


i was always a mad comet

by unicornpoe



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Apocalypse What Apocalypse, Aspec Martin, Canon Asexual Character, Canon-Typical suicidal ideation, Caretaking, Cooking, Developing Relationship, Food, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Ignores anything past the first five minutes of 160, Jonathan Sims vs Self-Care, M/M, Mutual Pining, Sickfic, Sleep Deprivation, Slow Burn, Tea, Tenderness, Touch-Starved, except season five, fuck season five all my homies hate season five, i stand in defiance of both god and jonny sims, one chapter per season, tea as a metaphor for love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:34:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24900025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unicornpoe/pseuds/unicornpoe
Summary: It is a ruin, to love someone like this, so wholly and without reason. How human he is: bleeding from the inside out.*They take care of each other in a string of little ways.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 235
Kudos: 737





	1. season one

**Author's Note:**

> hi yes hello
> 
> this is not what i should be writing but these fucky monster podcast men have taken over my life so i had to write something for them. the first few chapters are done; i'm planning on posting on a weekly basis, but we'll see if my impatience gets the best of me lol.
> 
> title taken from a love letter written by Wilfred Owen to Siegfried Sassoon, another gay poet, in WWI. It follows as such: 
> 
> _Know that since mid-September,  
>  when you still regarded me as a tiresome little knocker on your door,  
> I held you as Keats + Christ + Elijah + my Colonel + my father-confessor  
> \+ Amenohpis IV in profile.  
> What's that mathematically?  
> In effect it is this: that I love you, dispassionately, so much, so  
> very much, dear Fellow, that the blasting little smile you wear on  
> reading this can't hurt me in the least.  
> If you consider what the above Names have severally done for  
> me, you will know what you are doing. And you have fixed my Life --  
> however short. You did not light me: I was always a mad comet; but  
> you have fixed me. I spun round you a satellite for a month, but I shall  
> swing out soon, a dark star in the orbit where you will blaze._
> 
> CWs/Tws: food (which stays consistent for the whole fic, so if that's not your thing, maybe skip this one!)

His office is very dark. 

In his first few months as Head Archivist, Jon had tried to fight back the natural gloom that clung, weblike, to the walls down here. He had left the door cracked a hair so that some of the yellowish glow of the hallway’s sodium bulbs might spill through; he had procured a spindle-stalked lamp from home and plugged that into the dusty socket behind his wastebasket. 

Most of the hall lights have died by now, nearly six months later—and he likes the door shut anyway. A peculiar blend of hating the pass of shadows beyond the door, beyond his field of vision, and wanting to keep the words he reads between these four walls. 

Now, Jon bends over his desk and squints past the glare that lamp makes on the lenses. 

The tape recorder is whirring gently at his elbow, a steady sound that is familiar, if not comforting. The words on the page before Jon blend briefly into a long grey smudge—wiggling edges, a silvery shine to them—before sorting themselves out once more. John’s eyes burn. He is, he thinks, really quite tired. 

He hunches his shoulders, works a kink out from between brittle vertebrae in fits and unwinding starts. Keeps reading. 

Jon arrived early this morning, before any of the rest of the staff had shown up. He doesn’t remember deciding to awaken and come to the Institute; simply remembers looking up and seeing the long, dim hallway leading to his office before him, flickering with dying bulbs and nameless shadows. 

He hadn’t turned back. What was the point? By the time he reached his flat the sun would have risen, and he’d just have to complete the whole wearying journey once again. 

Dark. His office is very dark. 

No windows down here. Jon doesn’t have a clock or even a watch, but somehow he knows what time it is anyway, somehow he… something, somehow—seconds measured in the tick of pauses between words, minutes in sentences, hours between  _ statement of  _ and— 

“Statement ends.”

The tape recorder continues to whirr for a moment after Jon sets down the crumpled paper statement, picking up nothing but quiet until it clicks off. 

Jon looks at his own hands. Stretched across the desktop, bones sharp and knuckles pressing against thin skin. 

Jon hadn’t stopped the tape recorder. 

There’s a knock on Jon’s door, a clumsy-quick tap that draws his attention upward, and then it’s being pushed open before Jon has time to either welcome whoever is on the other side in or—more realistically—tell them to bugger off.

“Hello,” says Martin, and he is as round-faced and smiling as he ever is, taking up space in Jon’s little office. There’s something in his hands: shadowed, unclear. “Just thought I’d pop in and see—oh, sorry—uh, oh, are you recording? Sorry—”

“It’s fine, Martin,” Jon says, wearier than he’d meant to sound. “What do you need?”

As ever, Martin doesn’t appear deterred by any level of snap in Jon’s tone. He steps further into the room and doesn’t close the door behind him; it swings on hinges that creak a little, but Jon can’t see beyond the slope of Martin’s shoulders into the hallway, so that’s. Alright. 

“Getting late, isn’t it?” Martin says. His face is a cacophony: concern, a bit of hesitance, something like mother hen disapproval. Jon is annoyed in a nebulous way. His mind is still caught up on that last statement—the last string of statements—leaving no room for blundering coworkers and the feelings they inspire. “Shouldn’t you be heading home soon? It’s just, I noticed you were here before anybody else this morning and it’s going on eight now—”

“Martin,” Jon says. A definite snap. He has to look up to meet Martin’s eyes, and they’re washed of color in the lamplight. “Get on with it.”

“Right,” Martin says, still frowny but moving on. “Right. Uh, it was Rosie’s birthday today and I um. Baked a cake for her. There’s some left over though, and I thought you might fancy a slice?”

Jon blinks at him, eyelids heavy. All of those words make sense separately, but when Jon tries to make sense of them together they lose any shape. He wants Martin to leave. He says dryly, “what,” and doesn’t bother turning it into a question. 

“You know Rosie,” Martin says, characteristically choosing to focus on the only part of his sentence that Jon hadn’t had trouble with. “Works the front desk? Says good morning to you every day?”

Rosie doesn’t say good morning to Jon every day. Rosie is usually not in when Jon gets to the Institute. 

“Yes,” says Jon faintly. “It’s only, you… cake?”

Martin takes another shuffling step forward, and the shape in his hands resolves itself into a round white plate with a neat slice of chocolate cake perched in the centre. 

“I like to bake,” Martin says. His face has gone pink. Not a rare shade for Martin’s fair skin, although usually it’s the result of some fumbled mishap or annoying mistake, and not because he has just revealed a hidden skill. “Look, Jon, it’s not poisoned or anything.” 

“No,” says Jon, shaking his head, “no, of course not.”

Martin watches him for a moment more. When Jon doesn’t move, Martin lets out a small exasperated sigh and sets the plate down on the only spot of bare desktop. 

“Just eat it, Jon,” says Martin. His face is doing something strange; that same exasperation in the corners of his mouth, but something in the lines of his eyes that is soft and that Jon does not understand. Martin is. He is. He is made out of shades that don’t fit into Jon’s office. “You’ve been here all day and I haven’t seen you leave this room, so unless you’ve got a pantry in here I don’t know about, you haven’t eaten yet.”

Martin does this sometimes. Takes the slightly-scared deference with which he usually handles Jon and turns it on his head, gets Jon to listen to him with almost no thought. 

Jon finds himself nodding. Jon finds himself pulling the plate towards himself with his finger and his thumb. 

It does look quite good. And he  _ is  _ hungry, in an abstract, neglected, gnawing sort of way.

“Well, goodnight,” Martin says. Back to a shyly tilted head. “Don’t stay too late, yeah?”

Jon says “Go away, Martin,” and tells himself that he means it. 

  
  
  


Jon eats his cake. It’s—oh. Delicious. Unexpectedly so. 

He finds himself scraping the tines of the fork against porcelain, collecting any last bits of icing that remain, and scowls darkly at nothing in particular. It’s possible that he didn’t want to enjoy this. 

For no particular reason—and certainly not because of a nagging coworker—Jon heads home when he’s done eating, resigned to the fact that he’ll just have to finish up tomorrow. He tells Rosie happy birthday on his way out. 

  
  
  


*

  
  
  


Martin watches Jon. 

Bad habit of his, that. He’s done it ever since he was hired on here and first noticed Jon, seated slim and alert at his desk in the bullpen, his sweater vest both ugly and endearing, silver glasses perched precariously on the tip of his nose. 

There is something about him that catches Martin’s attention and holds it, tight-fisted and sure. Jon is a bundle of frenetic nerves stuffed inside of a body that seems too slight to contain all of it; Jon walks around with the weight of a man three times his age pressing down on those shoulders; Jon is currently dunking a tea bag into an empty cup with one hand and holding up a heavy tome in front of his face with the other, and Martin doesn’t know whether to laugh or intervene. 

Both, maybe. Both would be good. 

Martin doesn’t bother trying to get Jon’s attention, not while he’s reading. He just steps forward and slips the mug easily out of Jon’s grasp with a soft chuckle, and gets his hands on Jon’s shoulders. 

Fragile shifting bones, the soft fabric of his button-up. Martin swallows, and curls his fingers gently. 

The break room in the Institute is small; Martin only has to maneuver them two steps before they’re at the little round table, and then it’s just a careful nudge to get Jon seated. 

He doesn’t look up from the book one time. He mumbles something unintelligible, the permanent frown at the edges of his mouth deepening slightly. The bruises beneath his eyes have been growing steadily darker as of late, never lighter than indigo against his dusky skin. 

Martin itches to—to do  _ something.  _

Martin makes tea. 

Jon has a hand pressed to his forehead when Martin turns around—mugs steaming—right at the spot where he always complains of a headache when he’s been looking at fine print too long. Since Jon is effectively dead to the world, Martin doesn’t bother hiding it when he rolls his eyes. Stubborn. 

There are painkillers in the break room, too, and Martin grabs the bottle before he sits down. Just because Jon refuses to take care of himself doesn’t mean that Martin can’t—well. Well. 

Martin sips his own tea a bit—too hot—and waits for his flush to die down before he reaches for Jon’s attention. 

The break room is quiet. Just the buzzing of the fridge and the low rustle of Jon turning pages, exempt from any usual office chatter due to the time of day. Most of their coworkers are out getting lunch right now. 

Martin had been on his way out the door with Tim and Sasha when he’d spotted Jon standing listlessly at the counter, all cast iron concentration and erratic movement. They had both laughed at him when he’d chosen to hang behind, but it hadn’t been unkind. 

They know. What’s more—they seem to know with certainty. Can spell the shape of it out in words. 

Martin doesn’t think either of them have it exactly right, but he is not about to correct them. Not when the truth is more damning. 

When Jon sighs, gusty and pained, Martin decides that it’s time. 

He says Jon’s name, low, stretched across the table as a tentative offering. It doesn’t get results, but then Martin hadn’t expected it to; he is smiling a very small smile by the time he reaches over and tugs at John’s wrist with a light grasp, pulling his hand down. 

The book comes to rest with a dull thud. Jon starts at that, and then looks up with muzzy bewilderment. 

The frown is automatic and therefore meaningless. Jon’s default state of being. Martin’s had much worse from him. 

“Martin,” Jon says, and then “what,” and then a dazed sort of glare. 

There is amusement tucked up in all the corners of Martin’s voice, but he tries his best to shove that aside. “Sorry,” he says—and that’s his reflex: apologies that he will sprinkle like confetti—”but you were making tea without any water.”

Jon looks down at the mug by his hand—loose on the tabletop, fingers curled in an abstract curve—and then back at Martin. 

“That doesn’t make any sense,” he says. 

There’s such a certainty about him. No grey area with Jon Sims, no middle distance. It leads to a petulant, childlike conviction about even the smallest and least important things, and Martin  _ does  _ laugh now. 

“No,” he says, “ha. No. Rather the point.”

“Hm.” Jon gives the tea another look from above his glasses. Inches slender fingers forward until they brush the handle before finally picking it up. 

“These, too,” says Martin, and scoots the bottle of pills toward the middle of the table. He watches Jon because that’s what he does, and tries not to react when Jon holds the mug close to his chest like he’s soaking up all its warmth. The sight makes Martin go melty and fond. “For your headache.”

Jon directs that arch look at Martin. “Shouldn’t you be working?”

It doesn’t sting like it once would have. This is simply Jon’s way: caustic and unpleasant to speak to, yet stunningly adorable when Martin least expects it. Nevertheless, Martin’s face goes hot again. 

“It’s, it’s my lunch break,” he gets out. 

“Oh.” Jon’s eyelids drift closed a moment, steam wafting up to fog his glasses. Martin’s mouth is dry. 

“Right,” says Martin after a pause, feeling suddenly awkward. His voice has shot up an octave. He stands and collects his own tea on the way to rising, very conscious of the fact that Jon’s gaze has shot up to rest on him at that quick movement. “I’ll just…” 

He’s halfway out of the room by the time he hears Jon’s voice, floating toward him with that peculiar lovely cadence. “Martin.”

Martin turns. Jon is gazing down at the table with a furrow in his brow as if he’s displeased, but Martin knows he isn’t. This is his thoughtful frown, the one most often mistaken for anger or annoyance. The frown he wears to work out a puzzle. 

“Yeah?”

Jon’s fingers tapping against ceramic. “Thank you.”

Martin’s skin is flaming. “Gosh,” he says, and what the hell, who  _ says  _ that, “um, of course.”

He leaves quickly, before he can make a fool of himself even further. He doesn’t see Jon again for the rest of the day. 

  
  
  


*

  
  
  


It’s late. It’s late, and Jon stands before a door in the Archives, willing his feet to move. 

Martin’s statement from earlier runs through his head. He isn’t surprised by the fact that there appear to be towels tucked up round all the gaps between the door and the walls and floor, but he is—

Angry, he thinks, maybe, or—or horrified. Whatever the feeling is, it’s coiled tight behind his breastbone, and it burns like the stubbed out end of a cigarette. 

And it has led him here. 

Jon thinks about a couple of texts he thought Martin was on the other end of. Jon thinks about how annoyed he’d been; Martin skipping out on work for two weeks while the rest of them carried on. 

Jon shifts what he’s holding into one hand, and Jon thinks about what Martin has described: that relentless knocking. 

Very carefully, Jon doesn’t knock. 

“Martin,” he calls, feeling slightly silly with his mouth pressed close to the wooden door but willing to carry on. “It’s me. Open up?”

A fumbling sound: then the towels are pulled away and the door opens with a loud croak. 

“Jon,” says Martin the moment their eyes meet. His eyes are round, and his mouth is tending toward that shape the longer Jon stands here, unmoving. Martin’s ginger hair is softly messy, as if someone has been running their hands through it over and over again. “Is everything… are you alright?”

“Fine,” John says, and flaps one hand through the air as if to nudge the inquiry away. He holds out his other hand. “I brought you this.”

Martin drags his gaze down from Jon’s to his outstretched offering. Those eyes widen a bit further; pale lashes spreading like palm fronds. “Oh, Jon,” he says. 

Jon can’t tell how he feels. His face is doing one thing and his tone is doing another; Jon is confused, and therefore tightly flustered, and he wishes that he had simply gone home. 

“Yes, well,” Jon says stiffly. Martin’s quite tall. There’s a button missing on his cardigan. Jon files these slips of information away like statements. “You came straight here and your statement took a while, so I just. Thought you might like something other than… peaches.”

The smile Martin sends him is warm and more than a little misty, and Jon is alarmed and uncomfortable and the burning in the centre of his chest hasn’t stopped. Has gotten  _ stronger.  _ He thrusts the sandwich he made toward Martin’s middle with an awkward sort of hurry, and Martin’s big hands reach up to take it easily from him. 

“Thank you, Jon,” Martin says. Wide greenish eyes, pale lashes, soft hair. “I—well. Thank you.”

Jon nods. There are words pressed against his lips that ache to get out, but he doesn’t know what they mean and he is too afraid to say them. Not without certainty. 

Martin takes up much of the doorway, the sandwich plate looking small in those broad palms. Now that Jon takes a moment to look—to really look; unhindered by questions and statements and jumbled fear—he notices that Martin is… is tired. He seems thinner than he did two weeks ago, and the bruises beneath his eyes rival Jon’s habitual own. 

This displeases Jon. The Martin before him now doesn’t match up with the Martin that springs to mind when Jon thinks of him: that Martin is sunny and soft and has clumsy kindness in his smile. 

This Martin holds himself like he has something to be afraid of. 

“Would you, ah. That is.” He’s making a nervous sort of movement with his chin, directing it back toward Document Storage. “Like to come in?”

“No,” says Jon a bit too abruptly. Burning, burning—it’s tinged with embarrassment now, and he doesn’t know why. Jon Sims does not like not knowing things. He sure that he’s frowning—can feel the stretch of his tired face—but Martin as ever doesn’t appear to mind. He’s giving Jon one of those trembling-fond glances, and there is no rancor in his light laugh. 

Accepting. That’s what Martin is. Jon is self-aware enough to understand he’s really terribly rude, and Martin just. Accepts it. 

With a little smile. 

“Alright,” Martin says easily. Either Jon is extremely narcissistic, or Martin has seemed to straighten a little. Is brighter than he was before. “Thank you again, Jon. This was. This was really kind of you.”

Another frown. It wasn’t kind. Not especially. Martin does things like this every day: brings Jon slightly dry sandwiches and wonderful tea, made just the way Jon likes it. Jon is only doing what Martin would do for him. 

...which he’s never done before. 

Ah. 

His stomach curdles with guilt. 

“Alright, Jon?” Martin asks him again, when Jon has taken far too long to answer his previous statement. This expression, at least, matches up with Jon’s usual Martin perfectly: one of quietly-directed concern. “Have  _ you  _ eaten today?”

“Yes of course,” Jon lies briskly. “I’m perfectly fine. _ I’m  _ not the one who has been terrorized by worms.”

Martin doesn’t look convinced. “No, but—”

“Fine, Martin,” Jon snaps. 

Martin flinches slightly and Jon knows—Jon knows he’s done it wrong again, somehow, knows that he’s only hurt instead of help, like he came here to do. Taken a conversation that was barely scraping the edge of too sharp, and bent in half until it bruised. 

“Just,” says Jon, stepping back and shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his trousers. His folded knuckles bump his lighter on one side, the pack of cigs he’s taken to smoking again on the other. “That is. I hope the cot is. Sufficient.”

“It’ll do just fine, Jon,” Martin says. His voice is quiet in the dim hallway, and the light wraps dark like velvet around them both. “Free of worms, at least, so already about a thousand times better than back h—than the flat.”

Martin laughs. Nervous, a chuckle up on tiptoes. 

“Good,” Jon says faintly. 

“Night, Jon,” says Martin. He isn’t quite back to smiling but he meets Jon’s eyes, and his are the brightest thing between them. “Go  _ home _ , yeah? Thanks again.”

Jon gives Martin a smile of his own. Small as it is, he thinks it might help. 

He stands there for a moment after Martin softly shuts the door, watching as he pokes the towels back into place. 

  
  
  


*

  
  
  


He is back to watching Jon. Jon, who sits in his office with his leg at an angle legs should not be at. Who is still bleeding where Martin and Sasha had dug burrowed worms out of his dark skin. 

He—well. Looks awful. 

“Jon,” Martin says carefully. Jon hasn’t spoken since he collected Martin’s statement about the Prentiss attack, and switched the tape recorder off. Since Martin told him about finding Gertrude’s body. 

Shot three times. She had looked so small in her chair. 

Almost as small as Jon does. 

Martin pushes the image aside. 

Jon starts, and for one moment when he meets Martin’s gaze his eyes are so wide and fearful that Martin almost doesn’t know him. 

“Sorry, Martin,” Jon says. His voice is tired. Weighty and shredded, from the screaming, from breathing in all that dirty air. He passes a bleeding hand over those eyes for just a moment, and it shakes a bit. “Sorry, you… you can go.”

Martin doesn’t stand. He finds that he’s picking at a hangnail on the side of his thumb, worrying at it until it stings him, sharp and sour. He forces his hands still. 

“Jon,” he says again, and it’s—too bald. Open-faced and tender. He wants to wince away from words that Jon hasn’t even said yet; scathing or dismissive or achingly hollow, like every word has been since the attack. “There’s nothing you can do tonight, you know.”

“I,” says Jon, “I, Martin, there’s something, I’m sure—”

Martin might be awkward and nervous and scared and bad at being useful, but Martin can make a decision when he needs to. 

“C’mon,” Martin says, standing abrupt and sure. Jon’s gaze tracks his movement blankly. “You need to get out of here. We both do.”

Jon blinks up at him, heavy-lidded and slow. He hasn’t objected yet, and this is how Martin knows he’s won; Jon cuts in with an opposing remark instantly if he really doesn’t want to do something. Jon still hasn’t said a word. 

He’s too exhausted to, maybe, but fine. Martin will take his exhaustion. 

“Alright,” Jon murmurs.

“Oh—really?” Martin says, surprised despite all the evidence. 

The smile Jon gives him is very faint, but it  _ is  _ there, and Martin soaks it up like a flower does the sun. He doesn’t even mind that Jon’s laughing at him. 

“Yes, Martin,” Jon says. A little huff of air. “Might as well.” 

He stands, moving slow, unfolding knobby limbs like smoothing the creases of a paper crane. There is a moment where he wobbles—Martin half reaches out, unsure—but then a ruined hand folds down over the edge of the desk, steadying himself, and Martin’s breath falls away. 

They are quiet as they leave the Institute. Jon follows Martin with an acquiescence that he never has before and likely never will again, slow due to injury, stilted over cracked pavement. He gives Martin a swift grateful look as he holds the door for him; he tucks his head back down, and Martin is the only one of them that notices all the strange looks they’re getting from the rest of the patrons in this cafe. 

They order, and it’s a testament to how worn down Jon must be that Martin ends up paying. “I’ll,” says Jon vaguely as they make their way toward a table in the back. He sits heavily. “Next time,” he finishes. 

“Sure,” says Martin. Meaningless, but the routine manners are comforting. He passes Jon his own sandwich, and one of the two stout cups of coffee Martin had ordered them both despite the lateness of the hour. “Next time.”

Jon’s glasses are falling down his nose and he doesn’t appear to notice. Martin itches to slide them back up. 

He settles on adjusting his own. 

They eat quietly for a moment. Jon rests both elbows on the tabletop and the points of his shoulders rise up to frame his face like wings. 

Martin thinks about those tunnels. About thinking Jon and Tim were behind him, and the way he’d shouted when he realized they weren’t, and the ringing silence that had answered him instead of their voices. 

_ I’m sorry I left you,  _ he had said.  _ Oh, Martin,  _ Jon had answered, and he hadn’t said it was alright. 

Jon doesn’t lie.

Jon is going to try to go down there, Martin thinks. He  _ knows  _ Jon. And it worries him. 

“I am,” says Jon now, tearing the wax paper of his sandwich wrapping into shreds, “I am grateful for your help today, Martin.”

God, he says it stiffly. There’s so much tension in the line of his shoulders that he nearly shakes.  _ Bless him,  _ Martin thinks, his eyes stinging hot. 

Martin knows his face is a brilliant shade beneath his barrage of freckles. He’s somewhat comforted by the fact that he can still manage to be so flustered by this man in front of him, regardless of whatever crazy shit has happened to them today. 

“I didn’t do much,” says Martin. A reflexive shrug tugs him.  _ Jon doesn’t lie,  _ he thinks again—and the blush on his face redoubles, and he has to look away. 

“None of us  _ could  _ do much,” Jon murmurs. It isn’t a tone taken in intimacy: he’s taken on that blank look again, lost in those winding halls that make up his mind. “We did what we could.”

There’s that frown. Martin would lift it away if he was allowed. 

“And we’re all ok,” Martin adds. 

Jon’s amassed a little snowy pile of wax paper before him, bloodied fingers quick and frantic. His gaze skitters to Martin, and then fast away. 

“Yes,” Jon says. “I—yes. We’re all ok.”


	2. season two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _A creak of hinges. Martin’s feet on the threshold and then coming closer, treading these floorboards as he always does. They should be bruised in the shape of his soles._
> 
> _He stops. Makes a noise, a soft little sound that is round with surprise._
> 
> _Martin is tall and glows gently. Jon’s eyes hurt. He shuts them._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much for the comments/kudos on the last chapter! it's always daunting to write for a new fandom, so the warm reception made me smile :) 
> 
> CWs/TWs: food, canon-typical self-neglect, canon-typical suicidal ideation, canon-typical stalking (ie: s2 jon levels of stalking), discussions of death/dying/murder.
> 
> NOTE: this chapter is a sickfic, which i understand can be a touchy read for people during this time. while what i've written doesn't relate to current events in any way (jon experiences minor flu-like symptoms, but that's just it--the flu) please take the content into consideration and read with yourself in mind! stay safe, and if anyone has questions about more detailed warnings, don't hesitate to DM me on twitter @unicornpoe

Jon doesn’t try to be quiet. 

His phone buzzes in his palm, lighting the pavement beneath his feet a pale ghostly blue. He doesn’t check it, because he knows who it will be. 

He saw Tim’s face at his window not a minute ago, staring out at Jon with the same poison he’s glowed with for—god. Weeks now. He saw Tim and Tim saw him, and his eyes were black that many floors up, backlit as he was by the light from his living room. 

(The thing is that— 

The thing is that Jon needs it to be him.) 

Weeks since Gertrude was found, and neither Jon nor anyone else is closer to knowing who killed her. Jon has listened and listened and  _ listened  _ to the tapes Basira’s provided him with, and he’s scoured the tunnels, and he—he—he— 

(—it has to be Tim.) 

His phone buzzes again. A call this time. He hangs up, and the light makes his eyes hurt, and Tim’s messages remain there, blaring brightly out at him. 

GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM MY HOUSE

There’s more, but Jon doesn’t need to read them. Tim’s seen him and he’s seen Tim, and he isn’t going to learn anything tonight. 

(Tim is vicious when Jon bumps into him now, cold where once he was the only one with the warmth to bring everyone in the Archives together. He’s the only one who makes  _ sense.  _ Sasha is withdrawn and… and distant, but she doesn’t seem guilty. Elias is as unsettling as ever, but no more so than usual. Martin—)

Jon levers himself up from the wall he’s been leaning against all night. The sky is going pale with dawn. His joints ache, stiff, held still too long in the frigid night air. His head pounds. 

It’s too late—early?—to go home. Jon’s feet lead him to the Institute, and the rest of him follows. 

  
  
  


He gets in without running into anyone—without seeing anyone—and down to his office as if in a dream. There are statements to be read here, he knows; he’s taken to bringing in whole files at a time and stacking them on the dusty chair in a corner where the light doesn’t touch, staying in from morning to night without having to pop out into Documents Storage and grab a few more. Jon goes days without seeing any of his colleagues this way. 

Days without having to walk through the hallway and feel the way their gazes scathe him. 

Jon knows it’s his fault. He knows he should trust them. He knows— 

But there’s that constant paranoia, a fever-pitch scream behind his eyes and between his ears. 

Jon doesn’t want to die before he knows who will be doing the killing. 

Jon’s head feels like someone has slammed an anvil into it. Jon’s skin is hot, stretched tight over brittle bones. He’s sweating, he thinks, moisture collected at the back of his neck, but the air aches against his skin and Jon shivers. 

Jon opens up a statement, and the tape recorder clicks on, and he doesn’t think he did that. 

They’re all beginning to weave together in the back of his mind. The statements. There’s a tangle of names that he recognizes—he must recognize them—and places and events, and things that are called one thing but mean another. It’s like being slapped in the face but not knowing who swung: it comes at him from every direction, stinging when it lands, and he’s too slow to stop it. 

He gets through three before there’s a knock on his door. 

It’s the same as it ever is—three quiet taps—but the way Jon’s heart plunges toward the base of his chest is a newborn thing. He doesn’t know if it is fear or anticipation. He doesn’t know if he’s trusting or suspicious, and he doesn’t know if he should sit here in silence and wait for him to leave or— 

He says “Come in,” on a breath that feels punched out of him. 

A creak of hinges. Martin’s feet on the threshold and then coming closer, treading these floorboards as he always does. They should be bruised in the shape of his soles. 

He stops. Makes a noise, a soft little sound that is round with surprise. 

Martin is tall and glows gently. Jon’s eyes hurt. He shuts them. 

Martin murmurs Jon’s name and shuffles the rest of the distance between them; if Jon couldn’t feel the heat of him at all, he would know his closeness anyway by the clink of a mug sat on the edge of his desk, by the way his presence holds the air close. 

Jon wonders if he should be annoyed—Jon knows that he should be afraid. 

“Hey.” Soft; gentle; undeserved. (Martin—) (It has to be Tim.) “Jon. You don’t—you aren’t ok.”

Not a question. Jon would laugh, but it gets caught, it is honey-heavy in his throat, and it dies unborn at the base of his tongue. 

Eyes open. Martin: close and soft-edged, and a hand opening and closing close to the peak of Jon’s shoulder like he’s not sure if he’s allowed to touch or not. 

Jon is glad he doesn’t ask. Jon, who knows so many things without knowing how they worked themselves into his head, does not know  _ this.  _

He isn’t in focus, Martin isn’t; behind him, the office is nothing more than a smudge, walls swirling, a quagmire. Paint mixed with a palette knife until it blurs muddy brown. 

“Right,” Martin says. That hand is still there—Jon answers the question before Martin asks it. Shifts in the static space he occupies, an infinitesimal tilt, until the top of his arm is pressed perfectly up into the tender hollow of Martin’s palm. 

Martin’s breath quavers, his pale lashes flutter. That hand is so careful: fingers pinning together fraying sinew, rotting muscle, fevered bone. He couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t have. 

“Right,” again, firm as if to convince himself. “You’re going home.”

Jon’s tongue is swollen and sticky and slow, his words melted down. “No,” he rasps. 

Martin Blackwood and his opportunistic, steel-spined conviction. A slim furrow between his brows. 

“You’re ill,” he says. 

“I don’t,” says Jon, “I don’t, I don’t think I should.”

Something in him tilts wildly at that: tilts and spins like a carnival ride, making his breath clutch on the halfway point of a sob. 

Martin says, “Don’t think I won’t carry you out,” nothing more than a hitch on the last word. 

Jon could fight him—Jon should—but he doesn’t think he could win. 

He doesn’t… want to win. 

The point of contact on his shoulder burns. Wearily: “Fine.”

Journeying from the basement to the front steps goes by like watercolors. Jon’s sight is a smear; he makes the conscious decision to close his eyes again, and after that, Martin is in control. There’s more touch: the hand on Jon’s shoulder slid down to his waist, a forearm bracketing his shake-apart spine. Jon, tucked up, safe if only he would let himself be. 

Tim’s voice at one point. Hot guilt in Jon’s cheeks. Tim’s words scald and Martin’s words soothe, and Jon wonders if Tim would have killed him if he’d been the one to find Jon sick instead. 

(He hopes so. He hopes that when it happens, Tim does it in secret, in a way that can’t be traced back to him. Jon would like for them all to have the lives they had before Jon showed up. Jon would like—)

And then Martin is bundling Jon into a cab, hands all over him, assertive in a way that makes Jon sag with relief. 

It’s reflexive: Jon reaches for Martin before he thinks about it, hands like claws wound in the softness of his jumper. 

Their eyes meet. 

Jon breathes too fast. “Sorry,” he says, embarrassed, and doesn’t let go, and doesn’t let go, “so sorry, Martin, I…”

Martin hesitates for half a second. He climbs into the cab. 

Jon gives the cabby his address in a faltering voice. He is still holding onto Martin like he’s afraid he’ll leave if he stops, and Martin doesn’t ask him to let go. 

  
  


“Straight to bed,” Martin murmurs. 

Jon hasn’t been back to his own flat in… a while. He’s still in the clothes he was wearing yesterday; clothes that he keeps in his office for things like. Like this. The space is dark and cold, and he stands swaying in the center of the room as Martin flicks on the lights. 

Martin turns around, sees Jon, immobile. His eyes go soft, and so do his eyebrows, the corners of his mouth. He takes Jon’s elbow, gentle and not at all hesitant. 

“C’mon,” he says. “Bedroom.”

Jon does. 

He sits heavily on the edge of his mattress as Martin rummages around in the dresser, watching the care of Martin’s hands as he lifts up a pair of sweatpants and an old t-shirt with the logo faded off the front. Martin shuts the drawer with a nudge of his hips and then he drapes the clothing next to Jon, sending a pointed look over his round glasses. 

“Get changed, yeah?” He isn’t asking, which is fine, because Jon is feeling shivery and brittle and compliant. “Have you eaten anything today?” 

Jon shakes his head. His bedroom swings wildly, but Martin stays in focus. 

Martin sighs at him, small. (Couldn’t be him. Cares too much.) “Maybe,” he says, “you feel so bad because you stay up all night in the cold and don’t eat properly.”

Jon is exhausted, but he musters up a scowl. 

Martin quirks a smile. “Change and get under the covers. I’ll be just a minute.”

One more, Jon complies. There’s something so much easier about simply doing what Martin asks, rather than trying to figure out how to take care of himself on his own. He’s shaky, but he undresses while Martin is gone, only a little bit out of breath by the time he gets his sleep clothes on. 

Martin comes back with a mug of tea and a bowl of soup that he must have found somewhere in the back of Jon’s cupboards. “I tried to find toast or crackers or something,” Martin says, keeping his voice low as he clears a few books off of Jon’s bedside table, “but you’ve got. Uh, distressingly little food.”

“‘M not hungry,” mumbles Jon. It is not really an answer to Martin’s statement, but it does the job. He sinks back against his pillows, watching Martin through half-lidded eyes. 

“Well,” says Martin, and moves, and then Jon is somehow clutching a deliciously warm bowl in both hands. He looks down. Chicken noodle. Acceptable. “We’re gonna try to get something down anyway, yeah? I missed work for you, Jon, the least you can do is eat my cooking.”

It’s a joke, that last part, and meant to be taken as such—but Jon goes guilty all over again. Sourness in the back of his throat; a taste that’s rapidly becoming familiar. 

He flushes, not sure if it’s due to shame or fever. “Martin, I’m… sorry, I. I really shouldn’t have asked you to—it’s quite unprofessional of me... ”

Martin’s hand on Jon’s forearm. 

It’s bare skin against bare skin. It’s—just, Jon hasn’t been touched like that in quite a long time and he—and he— 

“...alright. Really. I don’t mind.”

It’s like earlier, in Jon’s office. Martin and his capable hands, and the place where they touch feeling like the point where Jon could easily unravel if one were to pull at the loose thread there. 

Jon brings the spoon to his mouth; Martin’s hand falls away, fingertips sliding down skin. 

Jon shivers. Jon eats. 

He drifts. The bowl is pulled from his loose hold after a while, and he doesn’t resist. Martin helps him forward—Jon shivers, and it isn’t because he’s cold—and he takes the medicine Martin feeds him, washing it down with a few sips of still-warm tea. 

He sinks back down. The world doesn’t shift when his eyes are closed; he is warm, and full. 

Martin slides Jon’s glasses off. They click as they’re folded. 

“Martin,” Jon says, or thinks he does: he needs to say it. Needs to reassure himself, to let Martin know that inexplicably, undeniably trusts him… 

“Go to sleep, Jon,” Martin murmurs. 

Jon doesn’t have the inclination to fight it. 

  
  
  


*

  
  
  


Martin shuts the door. 

John’s flat is cold. Martin turns the heat up a few notches, his feet moving in whispers across the floor. His heart is beating, and his heart is beating, and he swallows it down and the air tastes stale. 

He shouldn’t be here. 

He knows it, and he thinks Jon does too, even if their reasoning is vastly different. 

Jon thinks Martin shouldn’t be here because Jon is paranoid. Is terrified. Martin has seen the glint of horror in his dark eyes, the way he looks at all of them like they’ll press him to the ground and slit his throat at any second. Even if he doesn’t actively suspect Martin, which Martin really doesn’t think he does anymore—even then, Jon probably doesn’t trust him. Jon probably doesn’t want him around. 

Martin shouldn’t be here because he loves Jon. 

He hates the way his hands shake. He hates the tight-hot prick at the back of his eyes, the swelling sadness in his throat. 

(Tim hates Jon. He watches him with flinty eyes, his barbed words sinking into Martin’s skin even though they aren’t directed at him. Tim hates Jon, and Martin hurts from it.) 

Martin sits down heavily on Jon’s couch. The springs groan, and the slick upholstery has collected a thin film of dust. 

Jon lives here, but it isn’t a home. 

Martin thinks of the way Jon shook when he touched him. 

Martin closes his eyes. Rests his head back against the cushion, resigned to a backache. He’ll stay until Jon wakes up. 

  
  
  


There is a pain in Martin’s neck, and a clatter in the next room over, and Martin wakes up to pale sunlight streamed against his skin. 

He knows where he is instantly, with a kind of dread that has him shooting to his feet and fumbling for his glasses which have inexplicably been placed on the coffee table by someone who isn’t him. 

He stands still for a moment as the room resolves itself into fixed shapes: the blanket that had fallen to the floor as he stood, the curtainless windows, the light on in the kitchen. 

Another muffled crash. “Bother,” says Jon softly. 

Martin agrees. 

He stumbles on the blanket a bit, wincing as the pain in his neck goes sharp. Martin pushes into the kitchen—his heart clatters around in its casing—and then he stands still. 

“Jon,” Martin says. 

Jon is leaned quite heavily against the counter, looking brittle and annoyed. There’s a ceramic cup in shards near his feet—the source of the noise—and near his elbow are two empty plates, and a bowl of egg yolks whipped to a pale butter-yellow. The kettle hisses a warning. 

He still looks terrible. Tight and drawn, the skin near his eyes bruised. He needs a shave. His hair sticks up, tousled and flyaway. His gaze is glassy, but fixed so fiercely upon Martin that it barely matters. 

“Jon,” Martin says again, and then softer, words bundled loose in a gentle fist, “your feet—stand still.”

Jon looks down at his bare toes as if he’s just remembered they’re there. His t-shirt is too big on him; it drapes around his neck, his clavicles like checkmarks. 

Martin gets the broom. 

He sweeps carefully around where Jon stands, catching every sliver, and wonders why he feels so tossed and tumbled-around inside, shaky and vacant, all this yawning openness behind his ribs that is just the shape to tuck someone small and in need of care right into— 

The mug is loud as he dumps it in the bin. Pale blue with tiny green leaves around the rim. 

“Ok,” says Martin, a last-ditch effort to settle himself. He tucks the broom away and turns around. 

Jon is explaining before Martin can even ask, words unspooling between them. 

“I woke up,” says Jon, “and you were still there, and you… and I thought… you might want breakfast.”

Sunlight in the kitchen, too. The kettle is whistling full-tilt now, a jut of steam, so Martin takes it off and pours their tea, taking a new mug out of the cupboard above the sink. 

He turns to Jon. Stretches out the mug, ignores the quiet leap of his pulse when Jon reaches back, and folds Jon’s fingers around it with his own. Jon’s skin is smooth, dry, hot. All the skin of Jon’s arm is pocked with worm scars, from his palms to the place where the limb disappears under his sleeve. 

“You shouldn’t be out of bed,” says Martin softly. He hasn’t quite let go: they stand still, fingers over fingers, and Martin seeks out the ridge of Jon’s knuckles with an errant thumb. “You should still be sleeping.”

There’s something—Martin  _ likes  _ Jon’s frowns. Martin… likes all of him. Oh, so much. 

Scattered hair and pupils blown too wide. He’s still got a fever, almost certainly. His skin’s so hot. “Martin,” he says. His head is tipped back to meet Martin’s eyes. He’s still shaking, very slightly, just a tremor, just a tremble that rocks through him like soundwaves. “You didn’t… you couldn’t have. You didn’t do it.”

(The way Jon watches all of them with a wild, spinning gaze. Mumbles under his breath and records too many things like he thinks they won’t hear. The way he looks for his own death in every person he meets.)

Martin should be mad at him. 

“Go sit down, Jon,” Martin murmurs. 

Jon takes in a jagged breath, lips parted. He needs to use chapstick. 

Jon nods. Carefully, he wobbles to the table in the corner, and he has a seat. 

Martin’s hands feel empty without him. Martin shakes his head, flushing at the sappiness of his thoughts even though nobody else can hear them. 

Martin makes eggs. 

Jon is quiet as he does it, so Martin doesn’t look back at him. He just moves instinctually in this kitchen that isn’t his as the sun fully rises outside, as his tea steams on the counter beside him, as the events of yesterday and this morning play over and over again in his head on a loop. He should go, he should go, he should go— 

And yet he doesn’t. And yet he finishes the eggs, and fries up a few strips of bacon that he finds next to a shriveled onion on an otherwise bare fridge shelf, and plates it all and takes a deep breath and turns around. 

Jon is watching him—but then, that isn’t a surprise. Martin has felt his gaze this whole time, hasn’t he? A spot of heat between Martin’s shoulder blades, up his spine, curled at the nape of his neck. Martin would laugh, if he didn’t feel as if he might shatter: he’s usually the one watching. 

There’s an empty chair at the table across from Jon, dusty from its lack of occupants. Martin pays the dust no heed as he sits. His clothes are already sleep-wrinkled, anyway. 

Jon picks up his fork and begins to eat. There’s no interest to his movements, no pleasure—that gaze on Martin is avid still, and Martin is hot beneath it, but it’s fine, Jon’s not well, it’s fine, fine, fine—but he eats nevertheless, even if it’s automatic, and simply because it’s in front of him. 

They finish in silence. Martin waits for it to grow uncomfortable, but something stops the awkwardness from setting in. Maybe falling asleep on your boss’s couch gives you immunity to awkward silences. Maybe once your boss tells you that he doesn’t think you murdered an old coworker, nothing will be strange between you again. 

Jon stands when he’s done. 

The movement is faster than Martin expected—Martin didn’t expect any movement at all—and Jon is predictably unsteady on his feet. Martin stands too, much more calm, and takes a step forward until they’re face-to-face. 

“Well,” says Jon. He is somehow sallow and flushed at the same time, which doesn’t seem possible, but clearly is. “Thank—thank you, Martin, um. We should both get to work.”

“I—” Martin stops. A nervous chuckle works its way out of his throat. “Uh, what? Jon. You can’t be serious.”

Annoyance flashes behind those eyes—and ah. There he is. It’s at once comforting and bittersweet, the way Jon disgruntled means Jon feeling better. 

Not  _ completely  _ better, though. He’s listing to one side and doesn’t appear to realize it; Martin catches his arm gently, and nudges him straight again. 

That frown. “Of course I am,” Jon says. He’s plucking at the hem of his shirt with sharp knuckles, abstract and unintentional; there is weight against Martin’s palm where Jon leans into him. “I have. I have so much to do…”

“I know,” says Martin, because there’s no point in pushing back against the paranoia that has crawled in beneath Jon’s skin and sunk itself deep with hook-like claws. “I know you do. But you can’t work to your best ability when you’re sick like this.”

Jon’s frown lines have frown lines. “I’m not sick,” he mutters obtusely. 

“Oh my god, Jon,” says Martin, his chuckle faint and breathy, and he pushes away Jon’s fringe and curls his palm over Jon’s forehead. 

Jon makes a noise in the back of his throat, small, a hum, but doesn’t protest. His glasses are crooked, so Martin gives into the urge and straightens them. 

Jon doesn’t smile. Martin hadn’t expected him to. 

But his eyes slip closed. 

“Yeah,” says Martin, voice gone quiet and close. “Burning up, see?”

Jon stutters when he’s flustered, and when he’s tired, and when he doesn’t know what to say. All three, now. “Oh,” he says, “oh,” and, “yes, I see.” 

Martin laughs again, and it comes out as a half-warmed puff of air. Martin shouldn’t be laughing. Martin shouldn’t be standing here in his boss’s kitchen in day-old clothes, the remains of their breakfast on the table behind him, the man in his arms. Martin shouldn’t want to tug him close. Martin shouldn’t love him. 

Martin does. 

  
  
  


Martin stands by the foot of Jon’s bed as Jon calls Elias, his arms crossed over his chest. He isn’t trying to intimidate him, not really—it wouldn’t work even if he was; Martin might be big in every sense of the word, but Jon has seen him scared and soft too many times for his size to work on that front—but Jon is capitulating anyway. 

“I’ll know if you come in,” Martin says as Jon hangs up. He tosses his phone to the nightstand, movements sluggish. His medicine is setting in again, making him slow and sleepy. “Even if you sneak by me I’ll check your office, and if I find you there, I’ll be, um, upset.”

“Yes, fine,” Jon mutters. He’s gripping his elbows, forearms pressed across his abdomen; a mirror of Martin’s pose. “Fine.”

“Alright,” Martin says, shuffling backwards. He should go home and change, but he probably won’t. He can still make work on time if he hurries. “Um. Bye, Jon.”

He’s half asleep already, watching Martin through slitted eyes. His pupils glisten. “Bye.”

Martin would like to get him to lay down. Martin would—Martin— 

Martin has done enough. 

Quietly, he leaves. 


	3. season three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Jon is glaring at the floor, worry in the folds of his mouth, the spider web lines beneath his glasses. There go those hands again: restless and flighty as birds, picking, picking, picking at the hem of his t-shirt._
> 
> _Martin doesn’t think. He catches them in his own—gentle, gentle—and his thumbs rest over the race of Jon’s pulse, over the careful collection of tendon and blood and bone._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> writing this fic be like: *martin pines* *jon has a terrible self image* *martin pines* *jon has a terrible self image* *martin pines* *jon has a terrible self image* *martin pines* *jon has a terrible self image* *martin pines* *jon has a terrible self image* *martin pines* *jon has a terrible self image* *mart-
> 
> CWs/TWs: food mentions, kidnapping, very slight mention of unhealthy weight loss

It’s fine at first. 

Or—no. Not fine. None of this is  _ fine.  _ But the burn on his hand is still tightly puckered with stretched pink skin, still aches, still cracks when he moves too much, so Jon supposes it isn’t a terrible thing that Nikola Orsinov insists on moisturizing him with obsessive frequency. At least he’ll have healed better by the time someone finds him than he would have on his own. 

But days stretch into long, unspooled hours of darkness, and Jon has no way at all to count them. There is nothing. Nothing. And nobody finds him. 

It happens over and over again, lotion cool and thick and cloyingly fragrant on his skin. He starts flinching from it—cold plastic hands grab his neck and don’t let him move. He starts to protest out loud, and his mouth is held shut, a firm grass that presses on his throat and reaches up from beneath his chin. He starts to cry. 

It isn’t really a choice, when he leaves, even if he pretends it is. He’s afraid that he doesn’t remember what light looks like; there is a film across his skin, one he scrapes at with fingernails grown too long until he leaves lines in the residue, until he is scratched clean. 

  
  
  


Jon is hungry like he never has been before. Jon’s hunger has its own appetite, yawning and cavernous, and he is terrified of the thing that sates it. 

  
  
  


It’s fine. 

Nobody trusts him, but he can’t possibly begrudge them that. It would be—it would be foolish to trust him, after all of this evidence lined up like clues to a treasure hunt with a very disappointing prize at the end. Just because it isn’t all true doesn’t mean that none of it is. Just because Jon didn’t mean to hurt them doesn’t mean that they aren’t hurt anyway. 

He stays in his office mostly, working, and he is hungry, and he sleeps in snatches only when he’ll fall over if he doesn’t. 

Jon has almost built up a bit of a routine. 

Late at night, when he’s sure everyone will have gone home. It’s only respectful that he keeps himself out of sight of the others as much as possible—it’s only self-preservation. He leaves his office now, leaving the door unlatched a crack so that he won’t have to open it with full hands on the way back in, and heads to the break room. A cup of tea is in order. Something mild that won’t upset the tangle of nerves that seem to have made his stomach their permanent home— 

There is light spilling out of the break room, and a soft, aimless hum. 

He should have noticed. He should have—how hadn’t he  _ noticed _ ? He’s gotten complacent, apparently, confident in the fact that Tim and the rest will never stay in this place later than they have to. He’s an idiot. God, he’s so  _ stupid _ — 

Someone looks around the doorframe, and Jon goes cold with dread at the way he jumps. There is no way that movement won’t be used against him. Tim delights in the way Jon is—is—is so wary around him, so guilty that he thinks out every action a thousand times before he does it and still gets things wrong… 

“...ok? Jon?” 

Jon wrenches himself out of the pit he’s spiraled into, lifting his eyes once more. He blinks against the brightness, so stark after his dark office. His hands are buzzing, fluttering at his sides, and he forces them to go still. 

“Martin,” he says, the name stuttering out of him on an exhale, more air than word. 

Nobody trusts him—but that isn’t right. This man does. Martin does. 

Jon aches with not knowing why. 

“Hi, Jon,” Martin says carefully. He is always careful around Jon these days. Ever since Jon showed back up at the Institute about four stone skinnier, looking like he’d aged ten years in a few months, new scars littering his abused skin. The force of how much Martin seems to care is something too weighty for Jon to contemplate. Jon Sims is a coward. “You said you were leaving hours ago.”

“I thought… you…” God,  _ why  _ is his heart rattling around in his chest like that? He presses a folded hand to his ribs, and keeps the burned one held still. 

Martin’s smile is small and kind. Martin is… very kind. Knowing, too. 

“I didn’t believe you, of course,” he says. He keeps his voice soft, and Jon is grateful for that. Has always been. “Never do. You’re a really bad liar.”

Jon thinks about the way Martin peers into his office every evening to tell him he’s going home. Jon thinks about the way Martin encourages him gently to take off, too, and the look he gives Jon when Jon lies and says he will. Jon should talk about that. Jon says, instead, “Is that how you knew I didn’t kill him?” and his voice trembles on a weak laugh. 

_ Him.  _ They both know who that is. 

Martin’s smile fades away, but his gaze is still steady, his eyes are still wide and bright. “No,” he says simply. 

Jon’s breath catches. Jon thinks about the way he had known Martin hadn’t killed Gertrude—just known it, intrinsic and true—and realizes that he understands. 

“Oh,” he says. 

Martin’s laugh, light, barely nervous at all anymore. “Yeah.”

There’s a pause where they just look at each other, quiet and unmoving. 

Jon hasn’t been around Martin— _ just  _ Martin, nobody else—since he came back, except for those few seconds at the end of every day. It’s his own fault: Jon is avoidant at best and actively repellant at worst, and he hasn’t ever been the kindest to Martin so he’s sure the man doesn’t really… seek him out. Still. Martin is good to him, even in those few seconds. 

Jon finds that he’d like to repay the favor. 

“Have you, um. Have you eaten yet, Martin?” He rushes forward before Martin’s parted lips can resolve into an answer. “I was about to heat up some takeaway and I’d. That is, you’re welcome to… join me.”

He doesn’t think he could have made a bigger mess of that if he’d tried. But Martin is before him, tall and warm and smiling kindly again, and Jon remembers the shape of his hands, and Jon suddenly, desperately doesn’t want him to go. 

“Sure, Jon,” Martin says. “Yeah, that’d be great.”

It’s not going to be great—it’s day-old curry that he hadn’t even intended to eat tonight—but Jon follows Martin in anyway. 

“Tea?” Martin asks, holding up an empty mug. It’s such a familiar pose that Jon almost smiles. “That’s what I was doing when I, um, heard you.”

“Thank you, yes.” Jon opens the fridge. It’s a single-serving container, but there’s probably enough for two if Jon doesn’t eat much. Which is fine. This is not the thing Jon is really hungry for. 

A thought strikes him as he lifts the container. “Martin.”

Martin glances at Jon over his shoulder. His round cheeks are a bit pink, but in the light of this room Jon can see the shadows beneath his eyes, the slump to his spine. 

Jon knows he stares. He can’t help it. “Why are you still here?”

The pink goes darker, spreads beneath his freckles like a sunset. “Um,” Martin says, fumbling to switch the kettle on, keeping his gaze off Jon’s. “Sometimes it’s, uh. Easier to sleep here?” He stares at a spot on the counter, and his voice goes quiet. “Safe, I guess.” 

Jon sets down the curry. 

“Martin,” he says, heartbeat quickening, mind unspooling in a tangled thread, “the worms aren’t back, are they? Or—or spiders this time, or something else?”

“What—god, no, no, Jon.” Martin does look at him now—wide eyes, a bit of a surprised smile, but he’s paler than usual, Jon realizes—turning around fully. “Nothing like that. I’m sure my flat’s perfectly safe, it just… feels better to be here sometimes. To not… be alone.”

Jon has embarrassed him. He’s flushed from his forehead to the scooped neck of his jumper, and the curves of his ears are bright pink. Jon wants— 

“I understand,” Jon murmurs. The words feel thick and sticky in his throat, at once too much and not enough. He wants to do something, but—but what? “Martin, I… well. I would be a hypocrite if I begrudged you that.”

For a terrible, trembling moment Jon thinks Martin will cry. His eyes are lined in red, but it could just as easily be sleeplessness. 

“The thing is, Jon,” Martin says, “that the cot in Document Storage is always empty? And you’re staying here every night. So where…?”

Jon’s turn to face away. He busies himself with the microwave, jabbing buttons with more focus than the task begs. “Well,” he says, “well. My desk chair—”

“ _ Jon, _ ” Martin says, a blend of admonishment and a little horror and something close to sorrow that tightens Jon’s lungs. 

“I’m  _ fine,  _ Martin,” Jon says. The microwave hums loudly. He can’t turn around. He needs to. To. Needs _ —  _ “I slept in a chair both times I was kidnapped, and nothing bad came of that.”

He expects Martin to scoff, or chide him in that gentle nudging way of his. 

He does not expect thick silence. 

The longer it lasts, the more afraid Jon is to look. Which is ridiculous. Because it’s Martin, and Jon has never been afraid of him, not ever, no matter how hard he tried. And he had tried. 

He’s being stupid again. 

Jon turns around. 

Martin is staring at him. He looks—god. He looks like he feels guilty, impossibly so, such a feeling in the curve of his mouth and the hood of his eyelids. Martin Blackwood and the way he would fix everything if he could. Martin Blackwood, his quiet easy responsability, the way he trusts Jon, the way Jon doesn’t deserve that. Any of it. 

“I am so sorry,” Martin says with a voice that’s ragged. “Jon, that none of us found you, or—or even looked.” 

Jon used to think that Martin’s apologies were reflexive, results of intimidation. A way to pick up the pieces of all the things he broke along the way. Jon was wrong. 

Martin’s name doesn’t come out right on the first try. Jon clears his throat, takes a breath, tries again, and the microwave beeps and the kettle whistles and they ignore both. “Ma—Martin, no.” He sounds weary. “You couldn’t have known.”

“I did though,” Martin whispers. His eyes are wet at the corners now, red-rimmed with a vividness that definitely isn’t because he hasn’t been sleeping. He takes a step closer to Jon and Jon feels himself being tugged that way too, like a fishing hook sunk deep in his stomach. “I  _ knew  _ you hadn’t done it, and I knew there was a reason you were gone so long. Both times. I should have made Elias find you. I should have looked myself. I just—”

“He wouldn’t have done,” Jon murmurs. “He—ha—he  _ didn’t.  _ And one person alone might have been able to find me, but one person alone never could have gotten me out. Not someone so… not someone so human as you.” He swallows and it hurts. Martin is the most human person Jon knows, and Jon wants to sink into that humanity and wrap it around himself like a blanket. “They would have killed you had you come. And then I’d be even worse off than I am now.”

He tries to smile, but even he can tell how weak it is. 

“I just...” Martin shrugs, and Jon only realizes that he has a hand on Martin’s shoulder when he feels the movement through his palm. Martin is leaning into him. Jon doesn’t let go. “You shouldn’t have had to go through that on your own. I would have been there if I could.”

_ I know, _ Jon thinks, like a bolt of lightning to the core of him. It melts him completely. He wants to sway forward (Martin is warm; Jon remembers that from somewhere) so instead he steps back. 

“It’s over now,” Jon says instead. “It’s—yes. Let’s eat.” 

Martin looks like he still wants to speak, but he just nods. He gathers the tea, and Jon their food; when Martin leads them out of the break room, Jon follows without question. 

When they end up in Document Storage Jon is wryly amused but far from surprised. He sends Martin a look from beneath a lifted brow as the taller man shoulders the door open; Martin looks levelly back at him, stubborn and implacable. 

“You’re not sleeping at your  _ desk, _ Jon,” he says. Jon is a bit surprised at the level of fierceness in his tone, and then immediately knows that he shouldn’t be. This is Martin Blackwood, the only person to ever get Jon to take a sick day. “And you look dead on your feet, so we’re eating in here.” 

Smiling a little to himself, Jon acquiesces with an ease that stuns him. He doesn’t like being told what to do—but this isn’t telling so much as it is firmly suggesting. So. Alright then. 

Jon sinks down to sit sideways on the cot, his legs dangling off the side, and leans back against the wall. Martin joins him a bit more cautiously, but it holds both their weights easily enough. 

“Thanks for the curry,” Martin says after a moment. 

This isn’t what Jon’s hungry for, but he finds the warm weight of food in his belly feels good anyway. “Oh, it isn’t mine,” he says. He lets himself grin, eyes growing heavy as he sinks into exhaustion. “Elias stuck that in there.”

The sheer delight on Martin’s face is worth the potential backlash of stealing his boss’s food. “Jon!” he says, a little scandalized but—Jon hopes, distant and sort of embarrassed—also a little impressed. 

“Well,” says Jon. He finds he’s flushing, even though he volunteered the information willingly. “He  _ did  _ ignore the fact that I was kidnapped. I should think I deserve his unopened curry. He didn’t put his name on it.”

Martin smiles at him. His head is tipped back against the wall and he looks down at Jon, his eyes crinkled and warm, his hair gone messy throughout the day. “You absolutely deserve it,” he says quietly. 

There is barely any space between them. Jon can feel Martin’s heat, radiating off of him like a small person-shaped sun and sinking into Jon’s frigid skin. He wants—wants—-wants— 

They clean up their mess later, Jon tossing paper plates into the wastebasket at the foot of the cot and Martin gathering up their empty mugs and silverware. Jon watches Martin from the edge of his gaze, hiding his gaze beneath the curtain of his hair whenever it seems he’s about to be caught, annoyed at himself but unable to stop. 

Martin is… solid. Dependable. Tall and broad and soft. He would be. He would be good to touch, Jon thinks. To lean into. Big arms wrapped around Jon’s shoulders, gentle pressure coming around Jon from all sides… 

Jon blinks himself out of this train of thought and his skin goes immediately tight and hot and slightly itchy. Martin is looking at him, but no differently than he usually does: just a slight smile, that upward tick to the innermost edges of his eyebrows that softens the whole of his face. 

That is good, Jon tells himself. 

Jon nods at Martin, nonsensical and suddenly stiff, made awkward and formal by the irrational fear that Martin Blackwood can somehow read minds. 

Martin chuckles at him. It’s a nice sound, soft and small with round, sloping sides. “Please get some sleep,” he says, fond and exasperated in equal measure, no hesitation at all. “ _ In here, _ ” he adds, face trying to go serious for a moment before settling back down into the familiar contours of that warm smile. 

“Yes, Martin, fine,” Jon says—dismissive words in theory, but his tone of voice is almost shatteringly the opposite. He rolls his eyes for good measure, looks away. “I’m really quite alright, you know.”

Martin is quiet for a slip of a moment. “I  _ don’t  _ know that, Jon,” he says finally, turning it on his lips like a joke. There is too much weight to it to be a joke. 

Jon gives him both of them the mercy of treating it like one, anyway. He quirks his lips sideways. Meets Martin’s eyes. 

Martin taps his free hand against his thigh in a quick, casual little movement, something so thoughtlessly him that Jon’s eyes slip down to those fingers and stall there, entranced.  _ Human.  _ Relentlessly so. “Sleep tight, Jon,” he says warmly. 

Jon can’t look away. He sits on the cot because his joints suddenly feel as if someone has tied weights to each of them, dragging him downwards, and because Martin seems to want him to. “...yes,” he says vaguely. He knows that he’s frowning. The cot is still warm from Martin’s weight. 

Martin is still smiling when he shuts the door. 

  
  
  


*

  
  
  


The couch in the Institute break room is damnably uncomfortable, especially for someone of Martin’s height and width, but it manages not to be the worst place he’s ever slept. An impressive feat, if you ask him. 

Still, his sleep is shallow at best, and when Jon tumbles into the break room before five am the next morning all in a flurry, Martin is already mostly awake. 

“You’re still here,” Jon says, relieved at first, and then his eyes go wide—he’s not wearing his glasses, the foolish man, and he rams his hip into the table as he makes his way toward Martin with outstretched hands—and then he says “You’re still  _ here, _ ” corners of his mouth pushed down into a frown, dismay in that funny voice. 

“Um,” Martin mumbles. He sits, wincing a bit, and fumbles for his own glasses. Jon resolves into shape as he slips them on: rail-thin and sharp-boned, hair wild, looking thunderous. Martin’s breath catches despite the situation. Martin is… inconveniently gay. “Uh, yes? ...sorry?”

“No—” Jon huffs, flapping a hand at Martin in that way of his. That way that means this:  _ no, no, you’ve got it wrong.  _ He runs into the table again, so he simply sits down on the end of the couch, close enough to Martin that he could run his fingers through all that hair if he wanted. Or, well—if he was allowed. “I’m.. it’s. Oh, Mar—I didn’t  _ mean  _ to.”

Martin’s pretty good at comprehending things right after he wakes up, so he’s reasonably sure that Jon’s just not making sense. 

But he seems upset. All frown lines and frenetic hands. 

Of course Martin tries to help. 

“I’m sure you didn’t,” Martin says, keeping his voice even. “But I have… yeah, really no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Your cot,” Jon says miserably. His face is as red as Martin has ever seen it, and his eyes are liquid-dark. “You were going to sleep there last night, you were. Ah, safer there, you said, and I, I took it. I wasn’t thinking, I never seem to these days—I’m just. I’m really quite sorry, Martin.”

And he seems it, too. The way he looks up at Martin, the downturn of his mouth, his arms braced against the concave of his stomach and his fingers digging into the skin of his elbows. Jon Sims, at once uptight and more bare than Martin has ever seen him—in full possession of his mind, least—unkept and small and such a warm slender thing, here, a moment away from sleep. 

He is over dramatic and underprepared to deal with it. 

Martin could kiss him. 

Yeah—Martin could kiss him. It’s no different a feeling than the one he usually has, but it twists this time, a strong and yearning thing. 

“Jon,” he says, unbearably fond. He is breathless with how fond he is. He smiles, and he smiles. “I wanted you to have the cot. I’ve got a perfectly good bed to go home to, and you’ve got a, a desk chair. I wanted you,” he repeats, “to sleep there.”

Jon’s voice has gone soft, a slight drag to the middle of the word: “...right.”

Martin makes sure to smile at him. Nobody really smiles at Jon these days, so Martin has made it his job. It is not a difficult burden to bear. 

And then: “Thank you, Martin.”

He always says it like that. Two full words, and then Martin’s name with its stretched out  _ ah,  _ almost no hard T to be seen. Martin likes the music of it. 

Jon is very nearly too bright a thing to look at. Martin has to look away, and then back, and then away again, hyper aware of all the places they are almost touching in a way that prickles his skin. “Of course,” he says. 

It takes a moment—a moment of sitting, of staring in that bare-open way he does—but Jon seems to realize the state he’s in: sitting so close to Martin, his pajamas loose and worn, feet bare, glasses gone. He looks away too, now, flustered for a different reason. His hands still move. 

“Well,” says Jon. He tries to force some of the Archivist back into his voice, stuffy and formal, Martin can hear it—but it doesn’t work. Maybe it’s the morning. Maybe it’s the tumble of hair around his shoulders. Maybe it’s because he’s just gotten what Martin suspects to be the first full night of sleep he’s had in weeks. But something trips him up, and his voice is too rough to be anything but just him. Just  _ Jon.  _ “I suppose I…”

He gestures weakly toward the doorway, the hall, the place he slept all night. He stands up too fast not to be awkward. 

“Right, yeah, of course,” Martin says again. His throat is a little dry. Jon is clueless and adorable beneath the weight of gratitude, the slant of his eyebrows, the weight of his stare—Martin would like to hold him. Just for a little while. “I’ll just. Make a pot of tea, then?”

“Al—alright,” says Jon, jumbled with too much breath, and leaves the room with hands outstretched. 

  
  
  


Days later, and Jon appears in the doorway of the assistant’s office. He clears his throat and Martin looks up at the noise, surprised. Jon never comes here anymore. 

“Martin,” says Jon. His arms are stiff at his sides, his hands in pale-knuckled fists. The frown on his face is thunderous, but abstract: Martin can’t decide who or what it’s for. “Could you join me in Document Storage for a moment? There’s a… something.”

It’s an absolute shamble of a sentence, weak toward the end, clearly an excuse. Two desks over, Tim makes a sound like funeral laughter: not the sound he wants to be making, but the one that comes out anyway. 

Jon’s eyes flicker to Tim. He looks briefly and consumingly tired for a moment, so Martin stands up fast, and puts himself between them. “Sure, Jon,” he says, too loud. “Yeah, let’s go.”

Tim makes that sound again, smaller. Martin wants to hug him, and then Jon, and just— 

Martin follows Jon out of the room. 

They are quiet as they walk down the hallways. Jon looks a little bit better than he had days ago after Martin startled him in the break room: the shadows beneath his are are, while not completely gone, a shade lighter, and he holds himself less like he’s liable to collapse at any given second. Still, Martin worries. 

Martin will never not worry about him. It’s a product of this gaping heat in his chest. 

Jon opens the door with his head down. 

“I just,” he says, “I felt… bad. And this was more your room than it ever has been mine. So… ah. Well. You see.”

Martin does see, although his eyes are going hot in that annoying way they do when Jon is kind, so he might not in a moment. 

There is a second cot in this room now, set up against the opposite wall. A second pillow rests on the thin mattress, and a second set of sheets is made carefully over the whole thing. 

Martin says, “Jon.”

Jon is glaring at the floor, worry in the folds of his mouth, the spider web lines beneath his glasses. There go those hands again: restless and flighty as birds, picking, picking, picking at the hem of his t-shirt. 

Martin doesn’t think. He catches them in his own—gentle, gentle—and his thumbs rest over the race of Jon’s pulse, over the careful collection of tendon and blood and bone. 

Jon is so quiet. He stares at the place where their skin touches with wide eyes, the frown lifted from his face and replaced with an open, wondering kind of expression that kickstarts Martin’s heart. 

Slowly, he reaches. Thin brown fingers wrapped around Martin’s palms, shaking a little because he is Jon, but significant. Decided. Absolute. 

Oh, Martin could— 

Jon shrugs, but it’s helpless rather than dismissive, his mouth trying out the shape of a few words before he settles on the ones he wants. “I didn’t want,” he says at last, “for you to lose something that makes you feel safe.”

Martin is going to cry or laugh or…  _ it isn’t the cot _ , he wants to say.  _ It isn’t the cot that makes me feel safe. It’s you.  _

“Thank you,” he says instead. He says it like Jon: two full words, with all the intention he can muster. His voice is low and too close to adoring, but he can’t fix that. “You didn’t have to do that.”

For once, Jon’s hands are still. He looks at Martin so closely he almost feels split apart. “I know,” he says.

Martin will use this cot in a few weeks, when Jon and Tim and Basira and Daisy are gone and he is here in the Archives, alone, worrying, in love. He won’t feel safe. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> your comments and kudos are giving me LIFE, THANK YOU


	4. season four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Martin will fade away someday soon. Already he feels it tugging at all of his joints: a slow, painful-sweet ache, like an ice cube pressed to a sore tooth. Piercing deep. Insidious. There’s a spot in the fog that’s made for him, carved out in handfuls, miles away from anyone else, and no one will miss him once he’s there._
> 
> _But Jon will be safe. But Jon will get to rest._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter got a bit... hm... _fucky_ timeline-wise. all you really need to know is that it takes place throughout s4 and everything's pretty (temporarily) sad. keep in mind the Angst With A Happy Ending tag, folks ;)
> 
> CWs/TWs: the Lonely and everything that entails.

Tim is dead. 

Jon isn’t.

He sits up in a hospital bed, and he is thirsty, and his heart beats for the first time in months, and it hurts. 

  
  
  


Jon doesn’t realize that he’s been looking for Martin until his first day back at the Institute has passed and Martin has never been found. Jon can’t catch even a hint of him: not his favorite mug upside down in the sink, not a flash of ginger hair, not the round, wavering sound of his distracted humming. Basira is distant, and Melanie is angry, and Martin is… gone. 

The last time Martin hadn’t brought Jon a cup of tea in the middle of the day or popped his head ‘round the doorframe to wish him goodnight had been because Jane Prentiss was holding him hostage in his own flat. 

That realization bludgers Jon. He sits back in his chair, his hands tight on the edge of his desk, and he doesn’t move for a long time. 

Anger is what he feels for the first few days. It’s a thin and cracking thing, obviously stretched over what he really feels in an effort to keep that at bay, and Jon holds onto it desperately. If he’s angry at Martin, then he’s allowed to believe Martin is doing the wrong thing. If he’s angry at Martin, then he’s not allowed to miss him. 

And then he sees him in the hallway. 

And then Jon sees him in the hallway—sees the way his bright eyes have gone flat and gray, sees how all the round softness of him has flattened out and grown angles, until it’s difficult to even imagine being held by him—and that anger shatters and falls to the ground around them, leaving Jon bent and aching. 

There is nobody else around them. The hallway has gone dim. 

It’s not the first time—but it’s the first time Martin has stopped. The first time he hasn’t just kept walking as Jon trailed along behind him like a lost dog begging for scraps of affection. 

He looks… so much worse than Jon had realized. 

Jon can’t say anything, can’t force his lips into any shape. Martin’s happy-coloured hair has limped out of its usual curls, has dulled to a shade closer to wet pavement than sunset. Martin himself isn’t even looking at Jon: his gaze is vacant and directed at a spot right over Jon’s head, instead of down and right into Jon’s eyes like it always used to be. 

Jon wants, wants, wants—wants to touch him. 

But he doesn’t. Jon, who has not been afraid since that night in Yarmouth, is suddenly terrified. 

It’s a wild, gaping sort of fear. Not for himself. If he touched Martin now, Jon Knows that his skin would be ice cold, and that fact makes him want to cry. Martin is warm. Jon remembers. Martin is… is lovely, and warm as the tea he brings everyone he cares about, and smiles even when he’s sad. 

Jon doesn’t think he’s sad now. Jon doesn’t think that Martin feels anything, now. 

“H… hello, Martin,” Jon whispers. 

Martin won’t look at him. Not in the way he has, of hiding a feeling that he thinks is too big beneath pale lashes. No: this time it’s just that he doesn’t seem to _ want _ to look at Jon. 

“Oh,” he says, like he hasn’t been standing here caught in a cloud of silence with Jon for far too many seconds. “Jon. H—um, hi.”

Jon thinks about Martin’s hands on his months ago, the wet wide smile he’d given Jon, the fondness in his eyes so deep that Jon hadn’t been able to breathe right. 

Jon has been sleeping in Documents Storage every night since he got back. The second cot has sat untouched, its sheets dusty. 

“Martin,” blurts Jon, too loud, too sudden, and he makes himself jump with the bigness of it, “would you like a cup of tea?”

The question hangs between them. Jon thinks that Martin looks at him for a moment—not even a second—but it could have been… nothing. Just a shadow. Just a wisp of fog and a trick of light. 

“No,” says Martin, so quiet, and so still, “thank you, Jon. I can’t.”

Jon steps closer. He wants to and he doesn’t: the air around Martin is cold, but it has  _ Martin  _ in it. “Can’t, or, or. Or won’t?”

He is being inelegant about all of this. He is being clumsy and unsubtle, he is taking the fragility of this conversation and mangling it with shaking hands, and he just wants— _ all  _ he wants, god, he just wants Martin to  _ look  _ at him— 

“Does it matter?” Martin says. 

It does. It does. “If you can’t,” Jon says, or breathes, maybe, or maybe no words are coming out at all, “then I might be able to help you. If you won’t… ah. Then I’ll—I’ll have to leave you alone.”

Another step forward. Martin’s shoulders are rigid and fill out the coat he is wearing, instead of being the gentle and sloped and solid place to hide beneath that Jon remembers. Martin steps back. 

Jon stops. Jon’s chest hurts. 

Martin is so very far away. Distant enough that for one wild moment, Jon isn’t even sure he’s really there. 

“Please,” says Martin in that small, hollow voice, and the word drops like a stone into the pit of Jon’s stomach. “Please stop trying to…”

He doesn’t finish the sentence, but then he doesn’t have to. Any number of words could fit neatly before that end, and they’d all mean the same thing. 

He doesn’t want Jon near him, trying to stop him, trying to touch him or just be close to him or just meet his eyes—he doesn’t want Jon. 

Jon stands in place, nothing but will holding him up; he hates himself a little as he watches Martin walk away. 

  
  
  


“He really missed you, you know.”

Daisy does this sometimes. Plucks phrases from out of the blue that somehow line up perfectly with whatever Jon is thinking—although it’s less impressive this time, aided as it is by the fact that Jon is currently staring at the mug Martin always used to drink out of like a fool. 

He goes red anyway. Doesn’t meet her eyes. 

“Martin is… kind,” Jon says at last. He sounds tired when he says it, even to his own ears, but he knows deep in his bones that this, at least, is true. Martin is kind. Even if he’d looked away when Jon told him that he missed him. “He’s, um. He’s more human than the rest of us.”

Belatedly Jon realizes that this might be offensive, looks up at Daisy in alarm; she just looks evenly back. Her blue eyes are steady. She doesn’t seem to care. 

“I don’t know about that,” she says. “I don’t think you can… can feel like him, or look like him, and be all the way human anymore.”

Jon thinks of Martin’s hollow voice, and the mist that clings to his washed-out hair, that webs between his fingers. 

“He missed you,” Daisy says again. She does this, too: repeats something a couple times, because she can always tell when Jon is hearing but not really listening. “I think you should remember that.”

Jon can’t look at her. Jon can’t do anything but stare at that mug, at the chipped paint of some unidentifiable logo on the front, at the fast-cooling tea inside. 

There’s something yawning, yawning,  _ reaching  _ in his deep-down. 

_ Please,  _ Martin had said.  _ Please stop trying.  _

Later, Daisy ruffles Jon’s hair as Basira comes to collect her. The touch of someone who isn’t trying to hurt him—anymore—feels good, but he is too distracted to really take it in. 

Martin had never stopped trying. Even when Jon was—was—was—god, awful to him, even then Martin had been quietly helpful and doggedly kind. Had brought Jon cake, or biscuits, or tea, or a pack of crisps. Had touched Jon gently when he was ill, had made him breakfast, had bought him lunch and dinner and late-night snacks. Had smiled at Jon, smiled at him, smiled at him, until one day Jon had smiled back. 

Even now Martin is doing what he thinks he needs to be doing. 

Martin has never given up on Jon. So Jon isn’t going to give up on him. 

It is late when Jon next looks up, but he Knows Martin will still be here. He stands—catches himself on the edge of his desk when his knees go soft with being too tired, when his vision sparks—makes his way to the break room, Martin’s mug cradled in his hands. 

Jon washes the mug with more care than he has afforded a dish before in his life. He’s ridiculously nervous about making tea—Martin’s tea is perfect, he’s always seemed to just know what Jon likes, Jon has to do this right, this one thing—he could Know, he supposes; but this seems too precious for that. Too fragile. 

Jon’s hands shake, as they have done for… months. Years, maybe. He clutches the mug with a level of care that makes his eyes hot and damp, and walks slowly, slowly, slowly upstairs. 

Martin’s door is shut. Fog leaks from the cracks, as light as gossamer. 

Jon doesn’t knock. He doesn’t like loud noises, and his hands are full. 

He tries three times before Martin’s name leaves his mouth, and even then it trembles on unsure legs: “...Martin.”

Quiet. Then: the creak of floorboards, a shadow through frosted glass. 

Jon can’t breathe. “Martin,” he whispers again. 

There is a sigh. It is as lonely as a sea breeze. 

“Jon,” says Martin, and it is high and sad, and the pressure in Jon’s throat and eyes burns. 

“I, I, I,” says Jon; the syllables taste like iron. He steps closer to the door, closer—and then he can’t stop himself. Jon holds Martin’s tea to his chest and presses his cheek to the cold, smooth wooden frame. “I made you tea.”

Martin’s laugh doesn’t sound like one. Too many ripped up edges. 

“God,” he says, and his shadow is round and familiar, “why are you doing this?”

“Martin,” Jon breathes out. “I  _ miss  _ you.”

It’s quiet for so long. Jon’s eyelids drag themselves closed; the knob presses into the still-tender place where his bottom ribs used to be, aching sweetly, but he doesn’t step back. 

_ I miss you,  _ Jon thinks.  _ I miss you, I miss you, I—  _

Martin opens the door. 

Jon stumbles forward half a step, nothing holding him up anymore, and he should let go of the tea ( _ stupid, stupid)  _ and catch himself but it’s for Martin and— 

Martin’s hands on Jon’s shoulders. His fingers press deep, his palms are secure. 

They are both breathing too loudly. 

Martin’s chest is covered in a stretch of dark blue wool and Jon longs to simply tip forward, bury his face in the juncture of dark fabric and pale skin, let himself be held. Shaking, shaking hands. 

“I’m sorry,” Jon is saying. “I’m sorry, I. You asked me not to do, ah. This, but… Martin. I—I  _ do  _ trust you.”

Martin makes a sound like a sob trapped in a sigh, too small for Jon to really catch. For a flash of a moment, Martin’s cheeks are a healthy, glowing pink, and his hair is sunset-bright. 

His eyes, too—green, for one blistering perfect moment. They fade back to grey, but there’s something beneath it… 

Jon can’t tell if Martin’s mad at him or not. He can’t work anything out of the frigid-flat lines of Martin’s face. 

“You’re shaking,” Martin murmurs. Runs one flat palm down Jon’s shoulder, his arm, his wrist; he curls his fingers over Jon’s like an accident, involuntary, and it’s too breakable for Jon to comment upon. “Oh, Jon.”

“I just,” says Jon, searching the paths in his tangle of a head for some sort of explanation, some sort of justification as to why on earth he is here. Martin’s face is softening very slightly back into roundness, and it takes Jon’s breath away. “I… made you tea,” he finishes weakly. 

Martin closes his eyes for a moment. His throat bobs in a swallow. 

“Jesus, Jon.” It’s a breath, cloudy between them. “You’re so…”

Jon is going to laugh, or cry, or pitch himself forward and never emerge. The sound he makes is a wound. “I know. I know.”

He shivers. Doesn’t know if it’s anticipation or longing or exhaustion or the temperature of this room, of Martin—but he shivers, and Martin’s face goes drawn and dear in that way it always does when he’s making a decision. 

“Just this once,” he says. “Just, just.” 

“Ok,” Jon says, “Ok, Martin—”

“You can’t stay long.” Martin’s eyes open. They  _ are  _ greener than they were; Jon’s heart aches. “Tell me you understand.”

Jon would tell him anything at this point he thinks, shameful and flushed about it. He nods. 

“Tell me,” Martin says. 

“I understand,” Jon murmurs. 

Martin takes the tea from him. Martin draws him in. 

The office is cold like November, but Martin is still holding Jon’s hand so Jon doesn’t care. He leads Jon across a hardwood floor that doesn’t settle and creak like the rest of this old building, his own steps light and soundless. 

Jon feels newborn walking behind him. As unsteady and eager as a foal. He thinks about asking Martin to leave with him. He thinks about how he had meant it. 

“Sit down, Jon,” says Martin, squeezing Jon’s hand once with his own. Some of that old gentle bullying folds itself into layers of ice and catches Jon in the gut, compels him down with a soft-settled impact. Jon—Jon knows that this tentative armistice between them is fragile and afraid, knows how easy it would be to break; as such, he’s going to do whatever Martin says. 

Martin moves away as Jon sinks down upon the stiff cushions of the couch in the corner, tea cupped in his hands. Jon doesn’t reach out and grab the hem of his jumper, and Jon doesn’t reel him back in close, but Jon wants to. 

The office is so quiet. All he can hear is his own breath, ragged and strange. 

Martin leans back against the desk, ankles crossed in. The only thing very _ Martin _ about the pose he’s in is how gently he’s holding his tea, like spilling it would be devastating. The gaze he casts upon Jon is trying very hard not to falter. 

Jon doesn’t care. It means enough that Martin is even meeting his eyes. 

Martin’s lips are chapped. Jon can see that from here, about a yard away: they’re parted as he breathes, chapped on the corners, and that’s— _ wrong.  _ Martin always carries a tube of chapstick in his pocket. It’s scented like vanilla sugar, which Jon knows because Martin had offered it to Jon once many winters ago when Jon was complaining, and Jon had been so startled that he’d snapped at him, too vicious, and he’d felt bad about it but hadn’t known how to say— 

Martin says “ _ Jon,”  _ like it isn’t the first time, and Jon flinches. 

Immediately Martin looks guilty. It’s, regrettably, a familiar expression on his face. 

Jon shuffles his own features around, tries to make them as neutral as possible. He can’t, can’t, can’t frighten Martin away. 

Martin seems to catch on. His eyes flutter closed again, and he takes a sip of his tea, reflexive and shielding. 

Jon is shaking apart on the inside. He can see his hands moving anxiously in his lap, plucking the edge of his own shirt like guitar strings, winding and winding and winding the thin material; he wonders what Martin would do if Jon reached forward. Jon wonders what Martin would do. 

He closes his eyes too. 

They are quiet for a long time. Jon doesn’t know quite how long: there’s a perfect sort of darkness behind his eyelids that he hasn’t seen in a long time, head usually too full of garish nightmare images to give him the reprieve of nothingness, and no windows in this office to mark the movement of the sun. 

There is simply this: the stiff cushions beneath him. The cold fog pressed against his skin. Martin, an unseen indelible presence across the room. 

Jon hears Martin move eventually—the rustle of clothes—but he can’t open his eyes. It might not be real, if Jon opens his eyes. This might just be a dream. 

The couch shifts; a pressure on the end of the cushions, and Jon rolls toward it like a boat on a wave. He makes a little noise in the back of his throat that’s involuntary and broken-ended, and then Martin is saying “Oh, Jon,” again, and Jon is pulled into Martin’s arms. 

He goes immediately. Latches onto Martin with hands like claws, lets himself be folded in against that soft chest. Martin is big and wide and so careful that it hurts as he adjusts Jon; one flat palm curled over the back of Jon’s skull, his round chin rested atop Jon’s head, both arms wrapped completely around Jon’s torso, so completely that Jon feels smaller and somehow more important than he ever has. 

It’s more touch than Jon has received in longer than he can remember. The darkness behind his eyelids goes blaze-white, and the surface of his skin sings at a fever-pitch. 

Jon doesn’t ask what this is. It’s too precious to risk. 

Jon doesn’t let go. 

  
  
  


*

  
  
  


Jon is a jumble of knobby limbs, delicately hewn, fragile where he’s collapsed against Martin’s chest. 

It is a ruin, to love someone like this, so wholly and without reason. How human he is: bleeding from the inside out. 

Peter won’t be happy. 

Martin can’t bring himself to care. 

It isn’t the same empty, apathetic echo of the past months. This unconcern is deliberate. Martin can feel it in his veins, and leaping in his pulse, like a drumbeat, like a flame. 

One evening can’t mean anything. A handful of hours plucked out of the rest of Martin’s life in exchange for utter, total isolation. 

Martin tells himself this over and over again, the arm of the couch gouging into his lower back, Jon Sims curled against him with trust in every line of his being. 

He’s asleep, Martin thinks. Good. His eyes are limned in indigo-grey and he shakes like a leaf now every time Martin sees him, even from afar. He needs to sleep. He needs to be ok. 

Martin isn’t going to wake him. Martin would—Martin would rather sink into permanent oblivion than wake him, let the fog that’s always lapping at his ankles consume him completely before he took rest away from Jon—

Although maybe that’s the point of all this. Maybe that is the entire cause. 

Martin will fade away someday soon. Already he feels it tugging at all of his joints: a slow, painful-sweet ache, like an ice cube pressed to a sore tooth. Piercing deep. Insidious. There’s a spot in the fog that’s made for him, carved out in handfuls, miles away from anyone else, and no one will miss him once he’s there. 

But Jon will be safe. But Jon will get to rest. 

Martin squeezes his eyes shut, ignores the heat behind them. It still… hurts. To think about. Just a bit. 

Just sometimes. After he’s seen Jon’s face around a corner, or through a window on accident. 

Peter tells him that the hurt is almost gone. Peter tells him that Martin needs to pinch that hurt between his own fingers, twist, snuff it out like a candle flame. Peter tells him that it bothers nobody but Martin—that it’s only holding Martin back, keeping him from his goal—so he might as well kill it dead. 

Martin will. Martin  _ will.  _ It’s just that—that every time he believes it has smothered itself he thinks of Jon, and up it flares. 

Jon shifts very slightly, his long curly hair rasping softly against Martin’s jumper. His cheeks are gaunt and hollow, not enough roundness to his face anymore for the skin to squish with pressure. Martin’s jumper has pressed long red lines into that skin. 

Martin doesn’t know why Jon is here. Why Jon keeps seeking him out. 

It isn’t because Jon wants to see him hold him touch him know him—nobody sees Martin anymore. Nobody knows him. Nobody ever has. 

_ The Lonely’s really got you, hasn’t it?  _

_ You know, I think it always did.  _

It must be that Jon doesn’t trust him. It doesn’t matter that he’s said he does (that he keeps saying he does); Jon can lie. Martin never thought he could before, but Martin is foolish. Martin was probably wrong. 

It doesn’t matter. Martin consigned himself to this when Jon was lying small and still beneath starchy hospital sheets: Jon will not trust him, but Jon will be safe. Martin will see to it that he is. 

So, no—no, Jon isn’t here for Martin, even though he looks at Martin with eyes like river stones, even though he reaches for Martin with shaking hands, even though he is folded-crumpled-creased against Martin’s front, even though he brought Martin tea, but— 

But. 

But Martin Blackwood is a selfish man, and he’s never been good at doing the job he’s supposed to do. 

Martin will be selfish one last time. 

It was an easier decision than it should have been, all those months ago. 

Martin’s mother’s funeral had been empty and quiet. Just the necessary people, and… Martin. The son who was never good enough to make her love him. 

He hadn’t cried until her coffin was lowered down and covered up, until he was the only one left there. Alone. The tears were hot as they spilled out, and Martin hated himself dizzyingly with the way they were mostly for him.

He doesn’t remember going to see Jon after that. Only that his vision had cleared and he’d been by Jon’s bed, one limp, chilled hand clasped between both of his own. 

“Just wake up,” Martin had whispered. “Just wake up and I’ll help you. I’ll do anything you need.”

But Jon hadn’t woken up. And Martin had needed to fix things on his own. 

Peter Lukas’s hands are cold, but that’s a small price to pay. 

Soon it will be just Martin anyway. 

  
  
  


Martin doesn’t know what time it is when Jon wakes up: there aren’t any clocks up here, no way to mark how much time Martin spends by himself a day. But Martin’s leg is tingling where it’s crossed beneath him and Jon, slight as he is, has pressed an Archivist-shaped warmth against Martin’s front that feels foreign and lovely and terrifying and strange. 

Martin expects Jon to pull away when those dark eyes blink open—stand up, stutter that he made a mistake, leave again—but he… 

Jon’s hands flex where they’re caught up in dark wool. He tips his chin up to look Martin in the eye, heartbreaking resolve in the line of his mouth. 

“Come back,” Jon says. Sleepy-rough voice, absolutely no preamble even though it’s unsteady. Diving headfirst as he always does. There’s an empty pit in Martin where his fondness used to live. “We can—we can figure something out together, Martin, but this is—”

He breaks off. Here they are, still wound together: arms and legs, chests against chests. Martin is frozen to his core, would sob if he remembered how. 

“It’s cold up here,” Jon says at last, voice soft. “And I’m worried about you.”

God. God, six months ago those words would have sent Martin to his knees. 

Martin shifts deliberately enough beneath Jon that he gets the message. Eyes wide, he pulls back from Martin, movements slow like his bones ache. Maybe they do. 

Martin stands. He forces himself back a few paces from the couch, forces his hands down into his pockets instead of—instead of where they want to be. 

Sometimes looking at Jon feels like looking right into the sun. 

“You’ve got to go,” Martin says quietly. 

Moving like he’s in a dream Jon stands too. He looks small. Smaller than he did in his hospital bed. 

Martin looks away. 

“I,” says Jon, pausing halfway through the door, “would help you however I could, if only you’d ask.”

Then he’s gone. 

  
  
  


“You’re just making it harder for yourself.

Peter sets the hairs on the back of Martin’s neck on end, makes his molars ache with chill. 

“He won’t come back,” Martin says. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's a fucking pine forest up in here


	5. the end (lowercase e)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 4k words of touching and "i love you. i want us both to eat well" and softness and love confessions and tenderness. it's what we deserve. 
> 
> CWs/TWs: food preparation, discussion, and ingestion; Lonely aftereffects; canon-typical self-worth issues; discussions of sex, but no actual sexual content.

Jon folds himself around Martin in the small train car they are taking to Scotland. 

Martin has finally slipped off to sleep beside him, his head tipped sideways against the window, his lips parted slightly as he breathes. Jon watches him, chin resting on Martin’s shoulder: takes in the way the color of him has slowly seeped back into his cheeks and hair and paper-thin eyelids, the blunt roundness of his profile, the absolute weariness in the lines bracketing his mouth and eyes. 

Jon wants to put his mouth on Martin. Taste the pinkness of his cheeks. Jon wants to open him up and crawl inside. 

Jon thrums low in the pit of his stomach. 

Martin had held his hand as they’d climbed their way out of the banked fog of the Lonely. Broad palms and long, thick, blunt-ended fingers; his hands had been so cold—terrifyingly cold—when they’d first touched, but as the fog had turned to mist and then, finally, clear air, the palm wrapped so fiercely around Jon’s had heated. 

Jon had wanted to kiss him for that. To stop, cling to Martin’s front with both hands, drink him in. 

He hadn’t, of course. They haven’t talked about anything like that yet ( _ I really loved you, you know)  _ and Jon isn’t sure that’s something Martin wants at all ( _ I see you) _ and he point-blank refuses to Know. He isn’t going to Know Martin. He won’t. 

Jon thinks about what Peter said. How they don’t know each other in the realest sense of the word, not really. 

Peter was wrong. 

Jon doesn’t have to Know this. If Jon didn’t love Martin he couldn’t have gotten him out of there, and that is an absolute truth. 

Martin makes a quiet, snuffling sort of noise beside Jon, lips twitching in sleep, and Jon’s heart swells so large in his chest that he tastes it on the back of his tongue. It’s just— _ Martin.  _ He is here, he is real and alive, warm and soft and tangible beneath Jon’s grip. Jon loves him. Jon loves him. Jon— 

Jon is never letting go. 

  
  
  


Martin, Jon thinks, likes to feel useful. Likes to feel needed. 

Martin is both of those things. 

Jon has done a terrible (terrible) job showing him that in the past, but he—he has a chance now. It shines whole and perfect before him, and he’ll be damned before he lets it slip away. 

So, “Thank you, Martin,” Jon says softly as they deboard, as Martin takes both of their quickly-packed satchels into his big hands without being asked. Jon slips his palm into the warm dip that makes up Martin’s lower back; his fingers sink into soft worn wool, seeking at the heat of him that resonates from beneath. 

Martin is so much bigger than him, but he manages to send Jon a soft sort of look from beneath his pale feather of lashes. It is stutter-surprised, like maybe nobody’s thanked him for anything in quite a long while. Maybe nobody has. 

The thought doesn’t surprise Jon, but it does make him sad. Sad, and bitterly regretful. 

He pushes those feelings away.  _ Chances,  _ he thinks, so fierce that the word is a blaze at the back of his mind.  _ Chances.  _

“Come along,” says Martin quietly. Not quiet like the Lonely—muffled and lost and slipping away—but gentle. Easy. A precious thing traded between them. There is something like a confession at the corners of his mouth. “Let’s go… um.”

He goes pink. Deliberate about the way he doesn’t say home—it isn’t theirs, and Daisy hangs in the air above them. 

“Yes,” Jon murmurs. Wants to pull the bags out of Martin’s hands and put himself there instead. “Yes. Let’s.”

  
  
  


The safehouse is tiny, and musty, and dim. 

Jon doesn’t care. Jon is shatteringly exhausted. Jon stumbles as he steps over the threshold, a poetic shedding of the tension that’s kept him going for hours (days weeks months years) and Martin catches him, bedrock-steady. 

“Easy,” says Martin. He sounds just as Jon feels: there is the weight of a thousand aches pressing down on all the corners of his voice. 

“Sorry,” breathes Jon. Martin’s arm is weighty on Jon’s shoulders, an anchor of pressure that Jon tips into. “Long day.”

Martin laughs, a little peal of disbelief. Still, it makes Jon smile to hear that sound. 

For a long time, he thought he might never hear it again. 

“Yeah,” says Martin, breathy in Jon’s ear. “Tell me about it.”

Jon steps away but he curls his fingers around Martin’s before anything like a gap can appear between them. 

They should take stock of the house; check out the rooms, the space that’s to be theirs for however much time they manage to grasp. They should eat something, probably. Have a cup of tea. 

They don’t. They do a quick sweep of the house, just thorough enough to make sure that there’s nothing—no one—lurking in any corners, and then—

Martin says “Oh,” as they push open this last door, and lets their bags drop to the ground. 

Logically they should have expected this. These little missions of Daisy’s were certainly solo trips, and as far as Jon knows, the safe house has never been used by anyone but her. Still; Jon’s heart does something funny in his chest—a trembling flip, tentative acrobatics—and he finds himself clenching Martin’s hand too tightly when he sees that there’s just one bed before them. 

Jon glances at him sideways. He looks just as topsy-turvy. 

“I don’t, um.” Jon stops. Coughs awkwardly. His voice had come out too loud, unsteady like the bleating of a lamb. “Martin,” he says much too fervently. “I really, ah, I really don’t mind. Sharing, that is. In fact I would… rather, I would like to.” 

Martin is looking at him now instead of the bed, and his green eyes are shining beneath his round glasses. 

“If you don’t mind, of course,” Jon babbles, suddenly horrified at the idea that he might be forcing Martin to do anything he doesn’t want to do. He hates, hates, hates that thought: Martin deserves to make his own decisions. Martin deserves to be comfortable, to operate of his own free will, to have whatever he wants—

Martin stops the spiral in Jon’s head with a hand feather-light against his cheek.

His skin is soft and warm. 

“Jon,” Martin murmurs. Jon sways toward him, involuntary. “Of course I don’t mind.” And he smiles, a small and precious thing, and Jon will fight monsters to protect this man, Jon will… “I’d like to.”

“Oh,” says Jon stupidly. He can’t remember the last time he wanted to kiss somebody who wasn’t Martin Blackwood. “Ah, good.”

That smile. “Good.”

They stick close as they get ready for bed. They change with their backs turned—Jon doesn’t mind, doesn’t mind, doesn’t mind, but he isn’t sure if Martin does and he doesn’t know how to ask—and they brush their teeth with elbows knocking in front of Daisy’s cracked mirror. 

Jon doesn’t like looking at himself (his scars, all the evidence of what he’s done and what’s been done to him), but he likes looking at Martin. Could do for a very long time. 

_ The rest of time,  _ Jon thinks, and feels the flush that crawls across his skin when Martin catches his eye. 

Martin knocks Jon with his elbow, somehow managing to be fond about it. 

Jon catches that elbow with his hand. Curls his palm around it, tucks it close. 

They go to bed. 

There’s nothing uncomfortable about it. No room for that—no energy. Jon finds himself crawling beneath the covers already half-asleep, and when Martin’s weight dips the mattress down on his side, Jon rolls toward him easily. 

He thinks of the last time Martin held him. 

It’s so different now. 

“C’mere,” Martin murmurs. He arranges Jon with dozy-gentle care; tucks all his knobby limbs into perfect places, cradles him close.

Jon ends up with his ear pressed right to Martin’s heartbeat. He counts the pulses like music. 

“Goodnight, Martin,” he breathes eventually. 

The night is still around them. Jon is holding, and Jon is held. 

  
  
  


Jon wakes up and the space beside him is empty and he Knows that something is wrong. 

He’s out of the bed faster than he can See exactly what the problem is, stumbling barefoot over floorboards that are cold and unfamiliar. He doesn’t quite remember the layout of the house from last night but he doesn’t have to: he can See where Martin is. 

The information flicks through his mind like a film reel. 

Martin is on the kitchen, on the floor, in front of the stove. He is sitting with his legs crossed and his head tipped back against the oven door. 

He’s translucent at the edges. There’s mist licking at the soles of his feet. 

Jon gasps his name, and trips as he runs toward him. His knee smarts against the lino but he ignores it, crawling the last few centimeters between them until he can throw his arms around Martin’s neck. 

He’s cold again. 

“Martin,” Jon repeats, a litany, a chant. “Martin, I’m here, I’m here.” He threads his fingers through Martin’s soft hair, mussed from a night of sleep. “You aren’t alone. I, I, I  _ promise.  _ Please come back.”

Jon can see the moment it happens. The moment Martin realizes that there’s someone else with him, touching his cheeks and chin and eyelashes with shaking-gentle hands. 

Martin’s lips part. “Jon,” he rasps. 

His eyes are terrifyingly blank. 

“Yes,” says Jon. His heart beats a tattoo of terror on the back of his ribs. “I’m here. I’m here.”

“Jon,” Martin rasps, and shudders once, and tears roll down his cheeks like raindrops. 

“Oh, you,” Jon breathes, scrambling and splay-limbed as he practically sits on Martin’s lap. He tugs gently on the back of Martin’s neck until Martin’s head comes to rest beneath Jon’s chin, his breath wavering and cloudy on Jon’s clavicle.

Jon can feel Martin’s tears on his skin. They are hot and too abundant: it makes Jon weep in turn, sudden and without warning, stinging dampness at the back of his eyes. 

They don’t move for a long time. Martin shakes gently in Jon’s hold, his sobs muffled like he is ashamed, like he doesn’t want to be a bother. 

“It’s ok,” Jon whispers, even though he doesn’t know if that’s true, even though he is so scared that Martin will fade away again that he would fuse the two of them into a singular being if he could, just to be always at his side. “You can cry. I’m here, and you can cry.”

“I wanted,” Martin says on a shattered breath, “I wanted to make you breakfast, and I was doing fine, but then I looked up and the room was fog and I was so alone…”

He sounds guilty, high and tremulous with it. 

Jon’s stomach gives a vicious twist. He wants nothing more than to kill Peter Lukas all over again. 

“You don’t have to do that for me, Martin,” Jon says in what he hopes is a soothing tone, and winds his fingers into the curls at the nape of Martin’s neck. Grounding. He is not naturally good at comfort, but for Martin he will try until he dies from it. “You don’t have to… you don’t have to do anything. You can stay in bed all day and order me around if you’d like.”

It gets a laugh out of Martin, broken and small, and Jon feels himself grow warm with pride. Martin’s grip on Jon tightens gently. “I wanted to,” he says. His chest hitches, another laugh, another sob. “I want to take care of you.”

Jon’s heart lives in his throat now, throbbing and clenching and aching. “And I,” he says, “and I want to take care of you.”

Martin’s lips brush Jon’s neck. “I don’t think I know how to let someone do that,” Martin whispers. 

“Neither do I,” says Jon. “We’ll have to learn together.”

“Just,” Martin stutters, “Jon, just don’t leave me.”

“Never,” says Jon, and means it, and means it. “Never.”

  
  
  


They end up making breakfast together, unwilling to part long enough to let one or the other of them go it alone. 

Jon isn’t sure that he really needs to eat anymore—he hasn’t felt hungry for real human food in a long, long time—but he watches Martin’s big hands scramble the eggs they picked up before coming here last night, watches the turn of his wrist as he flips a rasher of bacon in Daisy’s cast iron pan, and the pit of his stomach that hasn’t seen a meal in far too long goes warm with anticipation. 

There is something about the thought of eating a meal they’ve cooked together. Something about the thought of each of them taking care of each other, in this simple nourishing way. 

Jon loves him. Jon loves him. Jon wants to kiss the ridge of his knuckles. 

Jon’s sort of hunger is a greedy thing. 

“We forgot milk or sugar,” Martin says, with a quiet, absent, untroubled frown. It’s such a mundane thing to be worried about. It makes Jon want to cry again—relief, this time—but they’ve had quite enough of that this morning. “We’ll have to take our tea plain.” 

“Oh well,” says Jon. He leans into Martin’s side, his head coming to rest on one sloping shoulder. “I’m sure we’ll survive.”

It’s nice to be able to say that. 

Martin looks down at him. All his edges are corporeal again, and the heat of his skin is heady. 

“I’m sure we will.”

  
  
  


*

  
  
  


Martin likes to bake.

He hasn’t had time for it in what feels like years, but now, nearly a week into their stay at Daisy’s safehouse, he finds that time is something they have an abundance of. 

So he’s going to make a cake. 

Martin gets out butter, sugar, flour, eggs. The store down in the village is small, but well-stocked; he and Jon have been twice now. Once, rushed and exhausted and shaking-nervous as they picked up a few necessities on their first night here, and then again a few days later, once they’d settled in somewhat. Once the frantic pounding of  _ runrunurn _ had faded into background noise. 

Usually Martin doesn’t waste good groceries on something as frivolous as this—it’s just been him so long, and it’s not like he can eat the whole thing by himself, which is why he’s always been the sort to memorize coworker’s birthdays—but this feels… special. Precious. Worth celebrating. 

Him and Jon, and the certain measure of safety that they’ve managed to scrape together with desperate hands. 

Martin glances behind himself out of habit, eyes landing on where Jon sits, hunched and studious at the little kitchen table. He’s reading: some flimsy paperback leftover from Daisy, yellowed pages and a man with too few clothes on gracing the cover. 

He’d lit up brilliant scarlet the first time Martin caught him reading one of those things. Frowned tremendously. “It’s just nice to read something normal,” he had said, voice trying to be haughty but instead just coming out small. 

Martin had very much wanted to kiss him in that moment. But then, he always does. 

Jon gets his guilty pleasures; Martin supposes that he does, too. 

“That one any good?” Martin asks absently, more to hear Jon’s voice than out of any real interest. He measures out flour with a careful hand, tapping the scoop gently against the countertop to level its contents. 

Jon stretches luxuriously as he looks up at Martin, rolling his neck, cracking his spine. He is at once cat-like and gangly; an accumulation of too-skinny limbs, a smile like a painting, a tumble of whitening hair. 

“Terrible,” says Jon, and he says it with relish. “I can’t believe it ever got published.”

Martin laughs. Not because that was particularly funny, just—just. Sometimes, lately, Martin’s chest feels too full of sunshine-warmth not to let some of it out like that. 

Jon smiles at Martin’s reaction, flushed-pleased and proud around the eyes. He always looks proud when he makes Martin laugh. It is both endearing and heartbreaking, and Martin would like to scoop Jon up in his arms right now and hold him as tightly as he dares. 

“What are you making?” Jon asks him presently, and— 

And that’s another thing that lights Martin up from the inside. Jon is actually, genuinely interested in whatever Martin does, and it’s novel and flattering and human. Jon tilts toward Martin like a sunflower; willing to soak up whatever attention Martin gives him. 

“A cake,” Martin says. One egg cracked in the bowl, and then a second; he’s not actually following a recipe, but he’s done this often enough for people to remember how. “Fancied a slice.”

Jon’s eyebrows rise up over the rim of his glasses, rounded and eager. “Like the kind you made for Rosie’s birthday?”

Martin pauses. 

“Did you,” he says carefully, “um, did you Know that, or…?”

Jon looks blank for a second—honestly confused, which is not an expression Martin’s seen him wear for a long time—before understanding dawns and he begins speaking. “Oh, Martin, no,” he says, words tripping over themselves. He abandons his book and stands, crossing the kitchen. “No, I just… remembered.”

He’s very close. This isn’t novel—they haven’t spent more than a few minutes a time out of each other’s orbit since Jon rescued Martin—but it still affects Martin anyway. Sets his pulse galloping like a fleet of horses. 

“You remembered?” Martin echoes. He’s disproportionately pleased. For a long time there, he wasn’t sure that Jon even knew who he was unless he messed something up very badly. 

Jon’s cheeks go dark, as if he’s been caught out. He is lovely. “Yes,” he says, “well, it was. It was a very good cake.”

Martin knows he’s beaming. Can feel the crawl of it across his cheeks. Doesn’t care. 

“Thank you,” he says, and he sounds too soft for a conversation about cake, but he just can’t help it. Not when Jon stands here before him, small and finally,  _ finally  _ safe. Not when Jon is smiling back. “Hopefully, um, you like this one too.”

“I will, Martin,” says Jon, absolutely confident. 

Martin bumps Jon gently with his hip as he turns back toward the mixing bowl, fondly jostling, and Jon doesn’t move away so neither does Martin. Jon leans against the counter and watches Martin in that unrelenting way of his, and Martin divvies up batter into two round pans. 

It is late afternoon. Sun pours in golden through the window above the sink, turning Jon into shades of amber and rose; it glints in his eyes, dark and round and trained steadily upon Martin’s face, and Martin can barely breathe. 

  
  
  


Jon has a sweet tooth. It’s one of the first things Martin noticed about him that made him think  _ oh;  _ that made his stomach warm, his hands nervous, his heart swoop in his chest. It’s one of those things that makes Jon mundanely and painfully human. 

Martin watches as Jon licks his lips, fork chasing the last bit of icing that’s left on his plate. His tongue is bright and pink, and his lips glisten a little as it tucks back into the safety of his mouth. 

Martin feels made of stardust. 

“Hmm,” Jon sighs, a soft, humming little noise of satisfaction. He stretches to set his plate on the coffee table, a hand on his stomach, and then he collapses sideways into Martin the moment he sits back up again with a little  _ oof.  _

Martin smiles down at the top of his head, where Jon’s hair is curled in messy loops. “Good?” he asks. 

Jon gets affectionate when he’s sleepy, which is something that Martin never thought he’d get the privilege to learn. He nuzzles a little into Martin’s side; Martin lifts his arm and drapes it around Jon’s narrow shoulders, his heart pounding. 

“Hm,” says Jon again. 

Martin’s going to take that as a yes. 

It gets chilly when the sun goes down in the Highlands; the both of them are already in their pajamas, and they each have one of Martin’s softest jumpers on, but still Jon presses as close to Martin as he can get. Martin—well. Obviously he doesn’t mind. 

Jon runs cold, and Martin runs warm. It’s just convenience, really. 

Still. Still, it feels like a blessing as Martin curls his fingers over the point of Jon’s shoulder. It feels like a chance. 

“Thank you,” Jon says presently. 

His face is turned into the softness of Martin’s side, mouth squished up against pale green wool, so the words come out muffled and mellow. Martin strokes a hand through his hair. “Of course,” he says.

Strangely, Jon frowns a little, struggling to sit up on the overstuffed cushions. 

“No,” he says, wiping strands of hair away from his mouth and eyes, and Martin feels himself frown too. Jon’s hands have gone fluttery and restless the way they do when there’s something nagging at him, and Martin wants to collect them close and kiss his palms, but he won’t stop Jon from saying whatever it is he needs to say. “No, I mean— _ thank you, _ Martin.”

Martin’s a bit lost. He isn’t touching Jon anymore, and he doesn’t like that; he fixes it by sliding a hand around the slender curve at Jon’s waist, that lopsided place where two ribs are missing. 

“Not just for the, the, the cake,” Jon continues. Wide eyes. They’re dark in the evening shadow, difficult to delineate pupil from iris. He leans into Martin’s grip a bit, and the knot of tension that Martin hadn’t realized had sprung immediately into his chest untangles slightly. “I mean for—Martin. Everything.”

Martin isn’t sure why they’re doing this now, but if there’s one thing he knows about Jon Sims, it’s that his beautiful brain works in unpredictable ways. 

“Jon,” says Martin softly. He brushes his thumb against the place where those ribs should be. “You don’t have to thank me.”

“I do, Martin,” Jon says. His voice: a length of night-pitch velvet. “It’s… you’ve always—” He stops. Breathes. It shakes, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “I have never thanked you enough,” he says lowly. “Ever. And you’ve always done so much.”

Their hands have found each other over the course of this speech, and wound together, and held on. 

Martin knows he’s blushing. He always does when Jon talks to him like that—like he is wonderful. 

It’s been happening so often lately. 

“You have given me more kindness than I’ve had any right to receive,” Jon continues in a small tone, and Martin hurts at that—hurts for him. Martin is no stranger to a poor self image, but Jon doesn’t seem to think there’s any good in himself at all. Martin will change that opinion. Martin will change that opinion if it’s the last thing he does. “Consistently, and… and since we first met. Since the beginning. And I, I never, ah, thanked you. Enough or... at all.”

He’s working himself up in that way he does: his eyebrows knit above his nose, his ceaselessly moving hands, his teeth sunk into his bottom lip until it turns raw. 

Martin catches one of those hands. Brings it to his own chest, cradles it close. 

“You don’t have to thank me,” he says again. “You obviously can if you want to, but I… I’ve never loved you because I wanted thanks for it.”

Jon’s eyes go even wider. 

Martin did not mean to say that. 

“Martin,” murmurs Jon. His voice is a quiet, scraped-out thing, and floats like he’s in a dream. “Martin I would… I would very much like to kiss you.”

Martin thinks he might be about to cry. “Yeah,” he breathes, “yeah, please…”

It’s so much gentler than Martin thought it would be. 

And perhaps that’s—perhaps that’s ridiculous. Because it’s been so long since Jon  _ wasn’t  _ gentle with Martin, it’s been years since the way Jon looks at him hasn’t been aching in its own way— 

Jon cups Martin’s jaw with unsteady fingers, and brushes his lips against Martin’s with a rattling exhale. 

_ Oh,  _ Martin thinks, and  _ oh,  _ and clutches the back of Jon’s neck like a lifeline. 

Jon’s mouth is sweet and warm and curious. He grows more confident when he realizes that Martin’s kissing him  _ back: _ he makes a little noise that goes straight through Martin, tender and wanting and wanton, goes willingly when presses him back against the arm of the couch, whispers Martin’s name like one might whisper a prayer. 

Jon fits against him perfectly. He always has. In every way. 

“I love you too,” Jon breathes, and the words slip warm beneath Martin’s skin. 

  
  
  


Later. There is moonlight crawling under Martin’s shut eyelids. 

“Martin,” Jon whispers. 

Martin is almost asleep, drifting in a hazy sort of tide. He holds Jon a little closer where the man rests upon his chest. “Ok, love?” 

Jon’s quiet for a very long time. 

Martin forces his heavy eyes open, tilting his chin down to get a good look at Jon. Jon—Jon, who is staring at Martin like he’s beautiful, like he’s given Jon a gift, like he has saved the world. 

“Oh,” says Martin very quietly. He finds himself tracing the lines that lead out, spindly, from corners of Jon’s eyes. “Do you like that?”

“Yes,” Jon says. His voice is sleep-scratchy, his voice is stunned soft. A deep breath, one that Martin can feel against his chest. “Yes, I do.”

Martin is smiling like a fool. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Jon looks a little dazed. He nods, pointy chin digging into the skin above Martin’s heart. “I didn’t… that is. I have something to say.”

Martin’s hand has migrated to the curls above Jon’s ear. “What’s that?”

“I just think you deserve to know that I don’t. Uh.” Nervous. Jon’s nervous, Martin realizes, here half-asleep in their bed at midnight. “Sex. I don’t like it.”

Martin takes a moment to answer. 

It isn’t that he is surprised, and it certainly isn’t that he’s upset. But he also doesn’t want to imply that it isn’t important, because of course it is: it’s a part of Jon. 

“Thank you for telling me,” Martin says. He keeps his words low in this night-dark room. “I, um. Honestly? I could take it or leave it.”

Jon blinks at him. Clearly, this is not how he expected this conversation to go. 

“Oh,” he says, and then “I,” and then “what?”

Martin shrugs, and the movement shifts Jon a bit. “I’m pretty indifferent as far as sex goes. I enjoy it sometimes, but it’s not really… it’s never really something I have a strong urge to, uh. Engage in.” He cups the back of Jon’s head, runs a thumb along the ridge of one cheekbone. “But you don’t like it at all?”

Jon shakes his head. His eyes have gone soft, moon-large. “No,” he says. “It, it…” he wrinkles his nose at the thought, and Martin smiles at him helplessly. “It’s… messy.”

God. God, Martin loves him. 

“That’s true,” says Martin fondly. Jon is pressing his cheek into Martin’s hand like a cat starving for affection, and Martin gives it to him in spades. “Well we won’t have sex then, love.”

There’s that look again. That dreamy look, that one so full of affection that it brims over a bit in Jon’s eyes. 

“I love you,” says Jon. 

Out of the blue like that it wallops Martin; makes his eyes go hot and damp. 

He kisses Jon’s forehead and lets his lips rest there. 

Together, they sleep. 

  
  
  


Martin wakes up to a kiss in the morning. 

Martin smiles. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you all so much for reading! i have been blown away by the kindness of your comments, and it's only made me more pumped to continue writing for this fandom! i have another jmart wip that i'm going to start posting soon, so if you think you'd like to read more from me, you can go ahead and subscribe to me as an author on ao3 and be updated when i get that up :D

**Author's Note:**

> thanks so much for reading! comments are to me what statements are to jon--which is to say that i have a supernatural addiction to them.


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